Word: commonnesses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...disbarring of a prominent lawyer. Disbarment is to the lawyer what being read out of meeting was to the New England villager. It is a judgment that a man who has made his name at courts of law is not fit to practice the law. Disbarment is not common: painful and shocking as is the impeachment of a judge, the disbarment of a prominent corporation lawyer is almost as exceptional...
...French statesmen the British really understand and admire and trust, he was most welcome. Since Great Britain and France are now, allied in a war whose severest engagements have been, and may continue to be, on economic fronts, no Frenchman could be more fortunately placed for the common cause than Paul Reynaud...
...Governor had a big problem of his own: he was a Harvard man, and the common people thought he ate nothing but ambrosia and champagne, and he didn't like this. And he saw that this was an opportunity to show the common people that he had the same middle-class sentimentality that they had, so he edicted in his common-touch manner--"There are some things in life holier than the mundane desires of earth. Sentiment is more noble than stomachly desires. Your Governor realizes this and asks you not to deprive your children of the edifying effect...
Creation of a great mass of vocationally trained people on the one hand and a comparatively small group of culturally educated persons on the other, would tend to destroy the unifying force in American democracy. For one of the bases of democracy is a common, diversified education. Education along these lines enables all classes of men to communicate with each other, to govern themselves, to lead richer lives. Abolish or seriously restrict a cultural education and the common bond of free men disintegrates...
...classic novels, the Chinese are peculiar. They are the world's longest (one runs to 127 chapters), oldest (some date back 700 years), most thickly populated (often include 100 characters). Their authors are mostly obscure. But what particularly distinguishes them is their style. Aimed at the common people, snooted by the super-pedants who monopolized Chinese "literature," frequently banned by imperial bureaucrats (who usually read them secretly), they were written in the vernacular. The least "literary" of great fiction, they mixed myth and legend with realistic anecdotes of love, family life, singsong girls, bandits, war lords, scholars, intrigue. This...