Word: defective
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Most serious as a defect ... is the loss of a sense of proportion. ... If an individual struggles through two laborious years to solve some minor problem in the internal economy of the earthworm, I am ready with congratulations, although my personal interest in earthworms is of the slightest. But no man can work so long and so intently without the tendency coming upon him to magnify his subject, with earthworms rising in his estimation to the status of pythons...
...Freshman. Similarly, the emphasis placed upon various topics discussed was not always commensurate with their real importance. As for that perennial blight of large courses, section meetings, they are still of little value to the man who has covered the assignments for himself. But time should remedy the first defect and the second will be solved when section men can be chosen for their teaching ability and not for their scholastic achievements. Meanwhile Professor Holcombe has to his credit the resoue from stagnation of a course that fills a role as important as any that Harvard has to offer...
...acting of Mr. Hampden himself, although the remainder of the cast came in for their share of popular favor. The play itself with its bombast and measured movement could not have stood alone on its own merits, but the performers seemed to cover up this defect to the entire satisfaction of the listeners...
...objection, for they avoid the Scylla of calling forth a mass, of unassimilated fact. Unfortunately this test has gone to the other extreme and fallen into the Charybdis of asking for too much in a limited time, thus emasculating whatever virtue it might have otherwise had. With this glaring defect as a drawback it is still impossible to form a sane opinion of student ability...
...cultivation of esthetic values; not in the foolish and pretentious fashion of the esthetes of the Victorian era but in the straightforward manly fashion of many of the great artists of the Renaissance period. . . . Unfortunately I have never learned any handicraft but I hope to make good this defect when I retire to become an enthusiastic if perhaps a belated bookbinder. . . . Even if bookbinding is but a small thing I console myself by saying that to have bound one book really well is to have added to the stock of beautiful things in this world...