Word: defectiveness
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French Ceiling. At the height of auction's popularity in the midigsos, the keen card mind of famed Yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt focused on the game's essential defect in comparison with present-day bridge: overtricks in excess of the bid counted toward game, just like bid tricks, so that a partnership could make a game without bidding it. Card Buff Vanderbilt found in the French variety of auction called plafond (ceiling) an innovation that he liked: only tricks bid and made were scored toward game, over tricks counting as above-the-line bonuses...
...Another defect involves the use of 1950 census figures in calculating current crime rates for individual cities, which distorts the picture to the extent that the population of those cities has changed since 1950. Also, in calculating the rates, you grouped together in one figure all reported offenses giving, in effect, equal weight statistically to larceny and murder, and larceny offenses generally comprise over half of the total...
Mind's Eye. If Twain the patriot was a cultural absolutist, Henry James the expatriate was a cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
Love-Affair. If Twain suffered from a certain crudity of sensibility, James's defect was overrefinement. His pinnacles of taste sometimes seem like parodies of it. In one such solemn-silly moment, James gravely agreed with a British friend that a certain garden at Cambridge University was "the most beautiful small garden in Europe." James loved the undistinguished quick rather less than the illustrious dead; nowhere in his travel accounts was there a jot of sympathetic indignation about the plight of Europe's poor and humble; Twain's letters are aflame with...
...Huxley stories in the collection bring out the spite without heat that is his peculiar intellectual climate. If there is one central virtue in his art it is that his creatures have the capacity to explain themselves: the central defect is that they have the compulsion to explain themselves away. Huxley rarely creates a character that he does not destroy...