Word: ersatz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What does it matter if Anthony Quinn's ersatz Tennessee accent makes him seem the subject of the Scopes trial? Who cares if Ingrid Bergman's good Swedish bones and wholly preserved beauty are squandered? Grandmothers are people too. And Alexander Portnoy isn't the only one with fantasies...
Fate has been less than kind to some of Switzerland's cherished enterprises. Foreigners are slicing into the Swiss cheese business with their own ersatz varieties; spies who used to patronize hotels in Geneva and Zurich have decamped to Vienna and Berlin; the U.S. Government is threatening to tighten up on Americans' use of secret Swiss bank accounts. Worst of all, the Swiss watch industry, for 300 years a source of national pride and world prominence, is facing an upsurge of international competition...
Imagination is, however, a kind of ersatz experience. When you see a starving child, you share his suffering through empathetic identification, through imagination. If someone who has seen a starving child is able to relay the sensory image of his perception, he can stimulate your imagination, to a lesser degree, to understand the child's suffering. If your learning is confined to reading non-empathetic accounts of the effects of starvation on, say, a million people, you are little better off than when you started. To understand, you have to translate the "facts" into examples from your former experience...
...title is just. For the British, this was not so much a war of pitched battles between armies as it was of ersatz eggs, smashed plumbing, maimed children and "austerity"-general misery that is orchestrated by enemy bombs and British bureaucrats. The 67 pictures that serve as illustrations to the book will be emotive to the older generation in Britain and should be informative to the young everywhere. Calder himself is young. He was born in 1942, not far removed from Britain's "finest hour," according to Churchill. The calculative eye of history, however, might identify it as Britain...
...From the visual put-down of depicting us as flat, two-dimensional beings existing on cigarettes and ersatz food to the condescension slightly tinged with apprehension of the article, you show clearly the mild contempt of the self-anointed intellectual aristocracy for the stupid middle-class geese who lay the golden eggs of taxes and keep our country running...