Word: bastion
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...appalling manners of the bourgeoise--as if from a great height, but always with a folksy, familiar smile. In a way it's a style that accentuates the very elegance it is perhaps trying to diffuse; a style all the more fitting to The New Yorker, that dual bastion and mausoleum of literacy, where Arlen's "The Air" column regularly appears. The New Yorker's literacy is a curious one, of course, harking back to the most Anglophilic time in our history. It is a magazine to be read in a mock-British accent, or at least some boarding school...
...irony. But irony is not what Hannah is up to. Irony is simply juxtapositioning opposites--a false stance adopted by too many poor writers. It is a higher form of advertising; one flashes on garbage and someone says, "Nice day for a picnic, dear." It is the last bastion of the ineloquent and the terminally stupid. Only Hannah can get away with a line in a love story like "I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging...
...bastion of virtue and beauty goes coed...
Through all the financial and political scandals in Italy's recent history, the national financial police, the paramilitary Guardia di Finanza, has always been regarded as a singular bastion of rectitude. Thus when retired General Raffaele Giudice, the Guardia's esteemed commander from 1974 to 1978, was recently jailed as a suspected ringleader in a $2.2 billion oil-tax fraud, it was rather like discovering that Michelangelo painted by numbers. Last week, as the scandal spread, four other high-ranking Guardia officers were put under investigation, and Giudice's former chief of staff disappeared before he could...
...unnerving. And when your phone's tapped, it's a little more unnerving. And when your files are rifled, your cars are followed, and your friends are arrested, then you begin to get real scared. When you see that happen all around you, you realize that Harvard is a bastion, an ivory tower, a place where you can be safe and get some work done. Because I don't intend to be knocked off by them," she says. "I know it's paranoia, but it's reasoned paranoia. There would be a lot more attention drawn to the harassment...