Word: caviled
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Beyong cavil, there are those who would conceive it highly unfitting to raise the standard of the Senate's prayers...
...published their views of their respective colleges in an article in the Harvard Crimson (undergraduate daily). These two men were one and the same-a certain Lucius Beebe, who, after being ousted from Yale, entered the class of 1927 at Harvard. Since a mind divided against itself cannot cavil, and a broken allegiance is apt to mean a sound opinion, undergraduates and graduates of both colleges found Student Beebe's views interesting. Said...
...Nothing is so easy in this life as to spatter mud or cavil. There has been a good deal of loose talk on the subject of the Board of Overseers and one constantly has to listen, often with weariness, to counsel of perfection when the annual printed list of suggestions appears, But let me ask again--would it be easy to improve on the list of men now in office? To be sure, it might be preferable--in the sense that they would be able to give more time to the duries if more mute inglorious Miltons were chosen instead...
...first act. Here your stickler would cry out at the exaggeration; but possibly it was the players who underscored too heavily, and possibly the stickler who exaggerated, so finely did the action cut to the truth. In the second act, and indeed throughout the play, the purist would cavil at the lapses into broad relief; too often cleverness passed for wit, and gross business for eyebrow innuendo. For the over-dramatic, Mr. Rathbone, in the tutor's role, was the only possible offender. It was naturally as difficult for him to disclose his smouldering fires to the audience...
...does cavil however, at Mr. Batchelder's assertion that the last College Character passed with John the Orange-man. One is inclined to think that he has fallen, here for once, into the error of other graduates, who know of the characters of the past, see those of their own time, but who have lost touch too much with the college to see those of the present. Need one give a list? Perhaps men do not like seeing themselves in print as "characters." But one may point to Terry, recently lamented, or to the whole tribe and olan of Yard...