Word: canting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more serious fallacy is Ibsen's assumption that doing one's own thing takes priority over everything else. True, in his own day he was battling the late 19th century's cant about honor, duty, the family, patriotism and God. Into a stiflingly confining atmosphere, he brought the courageous spirit of free inquiry. Still, in any era, society is a web of which the family forms the central strands. Children must be safeguarded and reared, and a continuity of values preserved. This is what society is about, and it provides order and sustenance for the vast community...
Core of Passion. Under its suavely British surface, Sleuth contains some bitterly anti-British sentiments. The celebrated games-playing vocabulary of the Englishwith terms like fair play and a sporting chanceis cant in Shaffer's view. It masks some bloody-minded bigotry and is no sounder a guide to the British national character than the ritualized tea ceremony is to that of the Japanese. Wyke is very pukka. Tindle is half Italian with a half-Jewish father. Wyke can be loftily amusing about this ("Some of my best friends are half-Jews...
...anthology does not hide Belloc's often absurd fixations. But it does reveal a writer of rare genius and rarer virtues, who had a Romanic love of order, ceremony and pietas, a raging contempt for humbug, snobbism and cant, an adult gusto and a childlike faith, an unerring eye for the telling detail of a life or a landscape, and a blunt, stately, crisp and virile style...
Political rhetoric tends to achieve a life of its own, congealing into cant and conventional wisdom, an unexamined shorthand. In a forthcoming book, The Real Majority (Coward-McCann Inc.; $7.95), Political Analysts Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg take a canny inventory of the nation's political assumptions and vocabulary. They conclude that some of the preconceptions of both Democrats and Republicans need a fresh going over...
Carry It On is not only a love story. The Harrises give the film considerable ideological intensity. Even those who violently disagree with them will find their conversation refreshingly free of cant and full of infectious urgency. The movie may not convert doubters, but it may well make them turn their doubt, however briefly, upon themselves...