Word: canting
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...writers, longtime members of the nation's fast-growing legion of field birders,* are Gilbert Cant and George Daniels. Why do they study birds? Both are a little vague on the subject, except to say that, once they started doing it, they liked it so well that they kept at it. Cant began as a small boy in England, where he saved the illustrated cards that came in packages of cigarettes. There was one series on birds. Says he: "That got me interested, and I started hiking around the countryside and beaches of England. I got dozens of books...
...Both Cant and Daniels are members of the Urner Ornithological Club in New Jersey. Cant, who was president of the club for two years, credits the late Charles Anderson Urner, for whom the club is named, for bringing him "out of the dickey-bird stage." Cant has never totaled the birds he has seen on four continents and dozens of Pacific islands, but he was once a member of a party that sighted the only western grebe ever seen in New Jersey. Daniels has a "life list" of some 800 different species. They include about 100 he has seen...
...Cant, who is now training one of his two sons in the sport, has also organized an "area count" in the national Christmas census of birds-a tabulation of the numbers and kinds of birds in various areas in early winter. A similar count will be made next month. Last year Cant, Daniels and James Baird, a graduate student in ornithology at Rutgers University, set out to break the record of 173 species of birds seen in one 24-hr, period in New Jersey. They found 169, ran out of time. They tried again, and this time they ran into...
...Books. Politically, says Orwell, he wrote "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." But where such a stand, in the case of another writer, might be trivial or tedious or pompous, Orwell made it into a passionate starting point from which to scourge all varieties of intellectual cant and hypocrisy. He denounced the Blimps who failed to see that Mussolini and Hitler were enemies of freedom, and he denounced the intellectuals who thought Stalin was any better. Much of his energy was devoted to carrying on a guerrilla campaign against the woolheaded fellow travelers who were poisoning English intellectual life...
...hope that more men like Carnegie Foundation President Carmichael will step forward categorically on the side of truth to expose this generation's educators and fellow travelers for the brood of nihilistic vipers that they are ? One would almost believe so, when pondering the inane and pious cant that appears as the profound soul-searching of the majority of contributors to Edward R. Murrow's This I Believe series...