Word: boorishness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Reason. Although Santayana himself had declared that he was no poet, comparing himself to Don Quixote, the Spanish-American War aroused him to "the Dionysiac frenzy and impassioned tenderness" that he considered essential for true poetry. When the Spanish Fleet at Santiago was destroyed; Admiral Sampson made the "boorish jest" of calling the victory a Fourth of July present to the U. S. people. Santayana wrote Spain in America as an answer. The poem is a lament for Spain's "sadness and dishonor," a moving and eloquent cry for a marriage of the two cultures, the spirits...
...mean airless garret in which little Ludwig was born, the courageous mother who had been a servant girl, the drunken father who kept the boy practicing at the harpsichord for cruel lengths of time. When Beethoven went to Vienna he was an awkward, ill-kempt young man, flagrantly boorish at the fashionable soirées where he would sit down at the piano, pour out one improvisation after another. He wrote with prodigious energy. First came trios, quartets, sonatas.* The first symphony was criticized for what then seemed to be an excessive use of brasses and timpani. Drums were pounding...
...years teachers and pupils fussed over the. Germanic script. While Miss Connor was in school, a devastating reaction set in. Standards collapsed right & left. Youngsters were allowed to run riot with pen and paper, express their personalities in rough squiggles, gross curlicues, boorish scrawls. "Horace Greeley's writing was responsible for this horrid idea," explained Miss Connor. "Just because he was a great man with a dreadful handwriting, it followed that all great men must have dreadful hands...
...substitute hostess. When it was over President Sproul took pen & paper, had it out with Miss Ijams. No punch-puller, he wrote to the Daily Californian, student newspaper: "We are misrepresented by ill-advised zealots who lack balance wheels and by one or two alumni who are so unbelievably boorish as to insult publicly a guest of the university in mere pride of personal opinion...
...England contentment reigned that Canada's boorish "Mitch" had made such a mess of his boordom. Last year, as one New Dealer to another, President Roosevelt sent to Premier Hepburn the old Ontario mace carried off by raiding U. S. troops (or "brigands" as Ontarians called them) in 1813. Last week this mace came near to being the only thing "Mitch" could claim has been obtained by the Province of Ontario under his Premiership...