Word: demure
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...result, most colleges have given precedence to “choice” and “freedom” in education to satisfy the diverse demands within the Academy and to demur from supposing it knows better than students themselves in what their university educations should consist. Unsurprisingly, an incoherent academic vision and ever-declining standards—along with ever-inflating grades—are the hallmarks of today’s higher education...
...working through A Writer's People is rather like listening to the postprandial monologue of a cantankerous old guest at a literary dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous...
...crime and poverty. Their entire lives are, by and large, extralegal. They do not donate to politicians and they do not vote. Their trade demands that they shed their citizenry, that they give up the privileges and protections of society for them and their families. The law does not demur to strip away their freedom, and they fill up the ranks of inmates in wild overproportion—over 55 percent of the federal prison population is incarcerated for drug offenses...
...President Bush's claims that Iran was causing trouble in their countries. Both Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and Iran's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki publicly reiterated their view of Iran as a friend and a positive influence for stability in their countries, leaving President Bush to huffily demur. Iran helped install the Karzai government and has a longstanding hostility towards the Taliban. And Tehran has also been a vocal supporter of the Iraqi government, whose leaders have been historically close to Iran. In both cases, though, these governments fear that the strategic rivalry between Iran...
...rights” invoked in defense of a practice which many demur from even mentioning cannot—and, if we live in a just society, must not—trump humane sensibilities and common sense. No sane person would defend barbarism for the sake of maintaining ideological purity...