Word: donnish
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...culture ... to rescue this word is the extreme of my ambition." So says Poet-Critic Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1948 Nobel Prizewinner, in the opening pages of his new book. But the reader who thinks this modest pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land. What's in a Word...
...American life is judged from the standpoint of the militant, orthodox socialist who believes that government planning must replace free enterprise as the cornerstone of democratic life. A dependence on stock socialist phrases thus flaws many parts of the book. The American Democracy, for all its numerous flashes of donnish wit, is also windily repetitive, and some times dated in its judgment...
...Useful Hypothesis." Julian Huxley is a nervous and abrupt man with somewhat the same kind of awesome intellect and donnish wit as his younger brother, Aldous (Brave New World).* Julian's tongue hurts as often as it humors; he was once described as "alternately cherub and pickle." In his picklish mood, he often puts people off with a burst of terrifying temper. Some delegates had reservations about picking a man who has professed atheism ("I do not believe in God, because I think the idea has ceased to be a useful hypothesis"), birth control, eugenic mating, state planning...
...arrived late at Rotterdam, where was their annual marte or faire, so furnished with pictures (especially landskips and drolleries as they call those donnish representations) that I was amaz...