Word: conceit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Soviet proposals make it clear that the United States will not get full cooperation until it abandons its attemps to defeat Communism and accepts the challenge of competition. Unless Americans abandon their conceit that refusing to trade with Communists will prove the superiority of capitalism, the Soviets will suspect, quite rightly, that cultural exchange is only a hollow gesture toward co-existence...
Nabokov's ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...party," said its newspaper, "has done great deeds, but it has also made mistakes owing to the drunkenness of victory and the conceit resulting from its great achievements. It has wrongly assessed its own powers, exaggerated its own importance and given insufficient attention to the roles played by other national forces." Furthermore, the Communist paper itself has "dealt in an inflammatory manner with certain events." Just so everybody would understand its previous "wrong assessment," the Central Committee now assured everyone that "the party condemns all draggings, torture, pillage...
Statewide Campus. Next to the last colony into the Union, North Carolina lacked good seaports for the cotton-slave boom that swept Virginia and South Carolina. "A vale of humility," the state was called, "between two mountains of conceit." In the Civil War it lost more soldiers than any other Confederate state; later it suffered its share of corrupt Reconstruction government until 1901. Heading the new leaders that year: "Education Governor" Charles B. Aycock, whose fiery crusade for schools got a new one built every day for ten years, gave education a permanent claim on a lion's share...
...Amiable Conceit. Not many years ago, most chickens sold in markets were either worn-out hens, roosters, or scrawny cockerels. Now most market chickens are grown only for eating, the result of a genetics race between supermarkets and specialty stores to provide the best eating bird. The meat-type chicken is never referred to by the industry simply as a chicken. It is too much of an all-purpose bird. With its plump breast and slim shanks, at less than a pound, it can be sold as a squab. At a pound it is widely sold as a Rock Cornish...