Word: epigram
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...accurate observation combined with an amazing clarity of design. The panther hammered from a sheet of gold and worn as a shield ornament in the late 7th or early 6th century B.C. contains, in its bulging, simplified planes, all the rhythmical vitality one might expect from Cubist sculpture: an epigram of predatory sinew translated into metal...
Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
...LITTLE LEARNING is a dangerous thing," moralizes one of the characters in Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, out of the depths of a drunken stupor. And the play could, if necessary, be reduced to that epigram and a couple of others, equally trite but true. But Kanin does such a good job of sugar-coating his didacticism that it usually remains palatable, even enjoyable. His "gems of wisdom" come in the rough, as drunken wisecracks or cute malapropisms ("This country belongs to the people who inhibit it,") and it is only in the final scene that the play seems...
...GOOD PREACHER gives himself away by his voice. His days are long and his duties unending, and laymen hang on every sentence he utters, expecting a commandment, or at least some inspiration-in-epigram. Answering a phone call at 3 a.m. with a hoarse "Jeezus Kerist! This had better be mighty important" can quickly send his young career to its just reward. So whether praying, consoling, or simply asking directions, his tone must always be confident, yet humble; loving, yet fearing; omniscient, yet uninitiated...
...Analects, selected sayings collected after his death. Mastery of these and other Confucian literature was essential to doing well on the Imperial Chinese equivalent of civil service testing, linking the Confucian tradition with authority itself. Portions of the analects slipped out to the west, occasionally capturing a philosophy in epigram, but more often adding flair to Charlie Chan scripts. Compared with all the politics and the bad jokes about "Confucius say this" or "Confucius say that," what The Master actually said seems relatively harmless...