Word: ersatz
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...STAGING, though, is vintage eleventh grade. In spite of Dennis Roth's set (including an imaginative ersatz stained glass window by Steve Baumgart), members of the cast constantly upstage one another, and company choreography is usually little more than spastically synchronized swaying. Tiny patches of the show are memorably wretched: unfunny anachronisms, offensive chatter about Harvard, a gratuitously swishy Wise Man, songs with three too many verses, and lines whose meter is often humanly impossible to navigate. Many of the supporting roles are weak, and some of the numbers are simply duds...
...1960s, there were few major U.S. department stores that did not depend for inspiration and line-for-line copies upon Paris haute couture. The knock-off Chanel suits and ersatz Givenchys were prized along with $1,000 originals and snapped up even faster. But the sudden flurry of boutiques, many of them stocked with French ready-to-wear as well as with newly inventive American-made designs, has put high style within easy access and a sensible price range. The youth rebellion crashed the old-guard fashion stockades by putting it all together (often out of trunks and thrift-shop...
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...