Word: desideratum
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Dates: during 1910-1919
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...anything else in the world, out of current revenues as nearly as possible in distinction from bonded indebtednesses. Debt is a millstone around the neck of a nation. Fortunate are the people who pay as they go. To keep as near that ideal as possible should be the desideratum of all statesmanship. Our enemies, who commonly belittle our activities, should at least know that, stupendous as has been our war preparation, we are paying an unprecedented fraction of it out of current taxation. Boston Herald
...mere consistency is a desideratum, the chief virtue of the present number of the "Advocate" is that it maintains a certain harmony of inferiority. Much of the writing is mediocre or positively bad. To the latter class belongs the prosesketch, "A Nightmare Whisper of the War." The author has contracted from Stevenson an aggravated form of the adjectival disease, and the ineffective anti-climax with which the piece concludes does not compensate the reader for the pathological exhibition to which he has been subjected in the foregoing tedious paragraphs. Though free from this contagion, the "storiette" called "A Gamble...
...proper, but this point needs both emphasis and a somewhat clearer formulation, for the benefit of certain members of our body academic who appear to have needed it not. What the University wants, and what America desires, and what the world needs is not mere "understatement and restraint"; the desideratum is that prejudice and passion be understated and restrained, and still more that the facts be stated and lib- erated. Let those whose privilege it is to be possessed of pertinent facts about the situation express them boldly and publish them abroad for our enlightenment; but let those...
...research consisted in the preparation of pure sodium carbonate, a matter which required exceptionally pure atmosphere because sodium carbonate holds every trace of acid which may come in contact with it from the surrounding air. A pure atmosphere free from dust and fumes is therefore a desideratum. This was just what the new laboratory with its pure filtered air was able to provide...
...foreigner selects his university with an eye to considerations which do not affect the average American student. Family tradition places no obligation upon him; clubs and athletics offer no special inducement; particular excellence of instruction is merely an added desideratum. The foreigner here, like the Rhodes scholar abroad, wishes above all to learn something about other standards, manners, and customs during the few years spent in our colleges. He is peculiarly receptive to every impulse, though, naturally, modest and awkward in asserting himself in the strange society in which he is placed. Behind this reticence he feels that he would...