Word: besetting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ernest Jones, official biographer of Sigmund Freud, seemed to agree with those sentiments when he wrote in 1930: "Chess...is a play substitute for the art of war." But in the same essay, The Problem of Paul Morphy, which discussed the paranoia that beset the American chess prodigy of the 1850s, he also moved Freud's much-debated interpretation of Oedipus onto the chessboard. Morphy, in Jones' somewhat questionable theory, had to sublimate a strong Oedipal urge to "kill the father." His own flesh-and-blood father was already dead, but Morphy had a surrogate father, Howard Staunton...
...number of Europeans on the road, on the rails or in the air this summer has reached a record 75 million, triple the level of 15 years ago. Largely because much of Europe was beset by the wettest and coldest July in a decade -the worst in France in 90 years-the hordes have been moving south to the Mediterranean in greater numbers and later in the summer than ever before...
Jamaica, like most of the Caribbean islands, is beset by an unholy trinity of poverty, malnutrition and unemployment. The islands' economies are often tied to single crops-sugar and bananas -that fetch low prices on world markets. They cannot mechanize agriculture to cut costs and raise incomes because that would only aggravate unemployment, which runs as high as 25% in Jamaica. The result is low productivity and per capita incomes that range from about $65 a year in Haiti to $555 in Jamaica, one of the more prosperous of the Caribbean islands...
Even on campuses where sex is relaxed, says Sociologist Simon, "kids still experience losing their virginity as an identity crisis; a nonvirgin is something they did not expect to be." Sexually involved adolescents of all ages are sometimes beset by guilt feelings, though less often than were their elders. Admits Ellen Sims, a Tenafly girl of 15 who says she has turned celibate after sleeping with three boys when she was in the eighth grade: "I was ashamed of myself. Sometimes I wish I didn't even know what I've done." Similarly, University of Pittsburgh Junior Kathy Farnsworth confesses...
Free Shakespeare was never anything less than a struggle. Besides the usual problem of financing, Papp and his crew were beset by those, including New York's then parks commissioner, who were scandalized by the very idea of free theater. With surprising political skill and an iron will, both picked up on the streets of Brooklyn, Papp hung on, determined not only to use the park but to have the city pay part of the cost of production as well. Eventually he got his way, and in 1960 the city gave him $60,000-revenue from subway chewing...