Word: delusional
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One gets tired of hearing about the "imminent breakthrough" in the war against the common-cold virus. This war has failed because of the fundamental delusion that a virus is the principal cause of colds, everyday experience notwithstanding. The fact is that a common cold is due to an overwhelming...
Like most of The New Yorker's laughing boys, Thurber can be insufferably chatty ("This may not give you the creeps but it gives me the creeps"), and he suffers from the peculiar delusion that anything written about a cocktail party is bound to be funny. He also lapses...
Another delusion is that of unilateral disarmament and Gandhi-like nonviolence. Hungary 1956, Jaspers makes clear, is the way Russia would have dealt with Gandhi. World government is an abstraction dear to many, but Jaspers insists that it could only be established by conquest and maintained by despotism. Harshly he...
Nobody really knows when the term "whiplash injury" originated, and U.S. insurance companies, which each year pay out substantial damages to supposed whiplash victims, undoubtedly wish it never had. The sudden backward snap of the head to which whiplash is ascribed generally happens in rear-end automobile collisions; these annually...
For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps...