Word: convert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Watching the semi-final game against Kentucky, the Harvard student became a convert. The 19 other students in the room were remembering with horror, a last-second loss to North Carolina in the 1982 finals...
Senator John Glenn, who could never convert his once formidable standing in public opinion polls into a commensurate number of primary and caucus votes, gave up his campaign on Friday. In debt $2 million and unable to win anywhere, even in the South, where he had staked his last hopes on appealing to a "sensible center," the former astronaut had no choice. He declined to endorse anyone, and said, "I don't aspire to be Vice President"-but added, "If I thought it was really important to the party and the country, I'd have to consider...
...young brother, struck by a car and buried in "a four foot box, a foot for every year." Young Seamus might have followed his father into the fields, had he not been introduced as a teen-ager to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Roman Catholic convert who became a priest and master poet. "A verse of his described an old farmyard and talked about 'weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.' Something in that language touched some secret storage of imagery that had been there, in my mind, since my childhood...
Then, too, minorities often take genuine pleasure in the culture of the majority. Many Jews enjoy the Christmas season for its songs and geniality, without feeling put upon to convert or run and hide. Buddhists may dye Easter eggs. Things inevitably get tense whenever a minority seeks to hold on to some cultural tenet that goes against the American grain (e.g., Mormons and polygamy), but in less extreme cases the tension works out to a compromise. Those who make concessions to the majority culture may be scorned as Uncle Toms or assimilationists, yet accommodation does not necessarily entail a loss...
...thought of John Wesley, that troubled missionary who learned something in the 18th Century that we have forgotten in the 20th. Homeward bound to England, Wesley gazed out at a tossing sea and wrote in his diary, "I came to America to convert the Indians. But oh, dear God, who will convert...