Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...York Review of Books last July, picking apart the translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 66. At last, in the February Encounter, Lolita's scholarly old man replied to Bunny. "A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field," Nabokov began, and went on to recall their old association: "I invariably did my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation" of Russian. And, just to finish the job: "Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise...
After centuries as the playing field of England's budding politicians, Oxford University understandably plays its own games of academic politics in mock-heroic earnest. Harold Macmillan twice won the prime-ministership by wider margins than his 1960 squeak into Oxford's chancellorship. "There's nothing most dons [professors] like better than a good bitchy election," observed the Sunday Times. Last week the bitchiest one in years had Oxford-and the nation -twittering as the port was passed...
Wild as the story may seem, it has survived the earnest attempts of a century of debunking historians, for the Princess Ayoubi is hardly the first to tell it. It has been told and retold in Limousin, where Mallet is as common a surname as is Johnson in Minnesota, since the middle of the 19th century. U.S. Consul Walter Griffin did in fact try to locate the inheritance, called it quits in 1894-and for his pains earned the disapproval of the French National Assembly, which demanded a more thorough investigation. Government opinion, however, seems to have quietly come round...
Nothing really happens to Ozu's characters except that they come and go, and leave unmistakable traces of humanity behind. Somehow, his austere style transforms the commonplace into a small, satisfying miracle of nature, the way a pebble makes ripples in a pond. And for earnest moviegoers, Ozu's refined camera technique is a revelation in itself, for he avoids the customary fades and dissolves, shoots every scene from a few feet above the floor, the approximate viewpoint of a neighbor kneeling on a tatami mat. It is an amiable posture, altogether appropriate for one of the world...
Once the Viet Nam appropriation is out of the way, Congress will turn to forensics in earnest. It will deal with little brand-new legislation (one possible exception: a moderate civil rights bill providing for more equitable ways of empaneling juries in Southern trials), but the leftovers from the first session are controversial enough to keep the drama high. The Administration has promised labor to continue its fight to repeal Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which permits states to pass laws banning union shops; Ev Dirksen, who held off the Administration's attempts in the first...