Word: commitment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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faubus (faw-bus), v.i.; FAUBUSED, FAUBUSING. 1. To commit an error of enormous magnitude through malice and ignorance. 2. To make a serious error, to commit a fault through stupidity or mental confusion. Syn. Blunder, err, bollix...
...England and Germany were still medieval, while France and Spain were somewhere midway between the two stages. "Renounce your desire to see Rome, my friend; what you seek there is not to be found any longer," wrote the aristocratic German theologian Ulrich von Hutten: "You may live from plunder, commit murder and sacrilege . . . but if you do but bring money to Rome, you are a most respectable person. Virtue and heavenly blessings are sold here; you may even buy the privilege of sinning in future...
...with President Eisenhower and Mr. Dulles to obtain assurances that the U.S. will not use force in Syria." In Iraq, the only Arab nation formally connected by pact to the West, the controlled press took up the cry, as Baghdad's Al Akhbar warned that the U.S. would commit "the most serious blunder" if it treated Syria as hostile to its neighbors...
...struggle for position after Stalin's death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov's breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued-political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly, the Presidium was a crowd...
Without benefit of lemon-squeezer, longtime Critic Eliot (The Sacred Wood, After Strange Gods) distills the essential similarities of two works centuries apart, Paradise Lost and Finnegans Wake: "Two books by great blind musicians, each writing a language of his own based upon English." Only once does he commit one of those calculated critical indiscretions of his Young Turk days when he dubbed Hamlet a "failure." Immersed in recent years in the poetic drama, Eliot permits himself the absurdity of suggesting that the early verse plays of Yeats "are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw...