Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great size of the baby boom generation also encouraged a sort of subliminal illusion. When time flows from father to son, from past through present into future, the generations have their orderly procession, moving vertically through time. But it was a metaphysical conceit of the baby boomers that the present expanded horizontally, into a kind of earthly eternity. "We want the world, and we want it now!" In the great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo profundities...
...familiar conceit is that each conductor interprets a masterpiece differently, continually freshening it. That may once have been true, when there were fewer concerts than today. But airplanes, records and the 52-week season have changed the rules of the game. Works are repeated incessantly in the concert hall by the same succession of globe-trotting conductors, and the same performance can be heard repeatedly at home. Not only have certain pieces become norms but their interpretations have as well...
Summits embody a noble human conceit, one that seems particularly American: that the world's conflicts are caused by misunderstandings and mistaken perceptions. If we sit down and talk, we can clear things up. Like most noble conceits, there is some truth to it. Summitry serves to lower the world's blood pressure. The two most powerful leaders on the planet smile at each other; somehow it seems that the rumbling forces of history, filled with clashing values and national interests, might thus be tamed. And like most conceits, there is some danger: neither the President nor the public should...
Wolfe's main conceit is that the upper classes are especially vulnerable to prejudicial treatment if they lose their insulation. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue and Southampton, the leading bond salesman at Pierce & Pierce, learns this harsh lesson when he is arrested for hit-and-run driving and plummets from a "Master of the Universe" to "the Great White Defendant," the dream of every ambitious $36,000-a-year assistant district attorney...
...fantasy with football fans in his best-selling Paper Lion. Now, in The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, Plimpton indulges the fantasy that he is a novelist. The book, which began as a benign hoax in the April 1, 1985, issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is based on a charming conceit: a narrator suffering from writer's block tells the story of Sidd Finch, a British-born Buddhist-trained monk who can throw a baseball 168 m.p.h with unfailing accuracy. Sidd, short for Siddhartha, joins the New York Mets in spring training and hooks up with Debbie Sue, a Florida beachgirl...