Word: cucci
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Evan Cucci's dire prediction of Harvard students "eating themselves in to an early grave" is only one of the outrageous assumptions about college students and food made in the course of his editorial ("Developing the Student Body," Feb. 9, 1994).The call for a university-wide fitness program and available nutritional information may indeed be a worth-while endeavor, but by setting such lofty standards for the bodies of the Harvard student body, Cucci only serves to perpetuate the anxieties of our weight-obsessed culture...
...Cucci's opening sentence fore-grounds the hegemony of the beauty myth: he could have chosen to complain that there are too many out-of-shape people at Harvard (though even the term out of shape implies a single, acceptable shape...
...Cucci offers the peculiar contention that many students want to improve their bodies but do not know how. In fact, it's no secret that if you work out and/or diet you will lose weight. But that is much easier for some than for others, both because of individual physical constitutions and because of the ways in which eating and food are overdetermined in this society...
Granted, in the second-to-last paragraph of his commentary, Cucci inserts the statement that "There is certainly nothing wrong with carrying more baggage than is required." But this nonsensical observation, with its implication that a certain amount of "baggage," and no more, is "required"--required for what?--in any case directly contradicts Cucci's initial assertion that there are too many fat people at Harvard...
...Cucci's argument were correct, all those "long, enjoyable hours running along the Charles at dawn" (at dawn, for Heaven's sake!) would have earned him a corresponding mental acuity. Apparently...