Word: basest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Students have been brainwashed by their culture, Barzun writes, into supposing that education should be exciting and relevant. Not so, says Barzun. The well meaning professor who tries to sensationalize his subject matter is catering to the basest instincts of his students. When a teacher is "exciting" instead of informing, "time goes fast and real thought blurs." Course work should discipline, not entertain, and Barzun waxes eloquent on the pleasures of drudgery. Nor do the liberal arts need to be relevant to modern problems. Such relevance he calls the fantasy of instant utility. Relevance for whom, he asks...
...makes her contribution to society by giving herself to men who need her. Besides being something of a satire of the American view of sex, it also contains sporadically funny pokes at psychiatry, transcendental meditation, scholars and assimilation-conscious Jews. All this is gone (or reduced to the basest terms) in the Buck Henry screenplay...
...stunned surprise. The surprise has since given way to an almost hypnotic fascination with the steady rise in the intensity of invective. At the same time, the language of Sino-Soviet polemic has steadily declined, on Red China's part at least, from occasionally elegant barbs to the basest vulgarities-far worse than the most acrimonious exchanges between Communists and capitalists...
...longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart. Until he does so. he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats...
...four-issue yearly subscription. This week, with the arrival of spring and the rutting season, the first 75,000 copies of Eros went to charter subscribers and on sale at bookstores. One quick trip through the newcomer's 80 pages should have been enough for even the basest appetite to discover that Eros is a four-letter word spelled "bore...