Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Overruled is Slaw as his most irrelevant. The mood of the play, and even bits of its plot, is very close to Wilde's Importance of Being, Earnest. Two married couples have gone on trips around the world, but each pair has split itself up and started from opposite directions. The husband from each pair has met and tried to seduce the wife of the other, and they have all wound up in the same hotel in England at the end of their trips. That sounds implausible, but then farce is built on implausibility...
Though Burns seems in many respects to be a typical New England Yankee, he was born in Eastern Galicia, then a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now part of the Ukraine. An earnest scholar, he was able to translate the Talmud into Polish and German by the time he was six. His family emigrated to the U.S. when he was nine and settled at Bayonne, N.J., where his father became a paperhanger, a trade that Burns learned as a schoolboy...
...dissident priests were in deadly earnest, and they asked the Pope's blessing. Instead, the Vatican quietly passed the word that the priests were to be denied meeting space on Catholic premises. Eventually, they were forced to meet at the Waldensian Protestant church near the Tiber. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore delta Domenica observed that many of them had in effect already left the church they were purporting to liberate...
Britain's new antiMarket mood was disappointing to EEC members. In 1961 and 1967, London submitted earnest, almost desperate applications for membership, only to see them unceremoniously vetoed by Charles de Gaulle. When the general was replaced last June by a French government more sympathetic to British entry, the Common Market ministers quickly began studying the possibility of reopening negotiations with Britain and three other applicants (Ireland, Norway and Denmark...
Famous Rebuttal. Protestants who envision Roman Catholicism as being out of touch with Scripture may be surprised to find how much of the Catholic Mass is derived from the Old and New Testaments. Catholics, on the other hand, may gain a new respect for the earnest Biblical faith of Protestant heroes. Acts 5:29 ("We must obey God rather than men"), the commentary notes, inspired Martin Luther's famous refusal to recant-"to go against conscience is neither right nor safe"-as well as the defiance of Nazism by Germany's Confessing Church. Some examples of heroism...