Word: exemplar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...real life, a little exalted and, at the same time, perpetually risking compromise. Cautionary romances, like William Wyler's 1953 film Roman Holiday, have alerted us to the restrictive, hermetic and sometimes suffocating side of royal life. A princess is required to be both an ornament and an exemplar, a rarefied high-wire act that calls for a lot more skill than a good sense of balance. Everyone waits for a false step, and there are even some who will shake the wire. Diana's older sister, Lady Sarah, was an earlier entrant in the nuptial derby...
...editors and journalists. The people out there are tired of someone who has all the answers." Only half kiddingly, Barber would even "forbid a candidate to discuss what he would do if elected," remembering F.D.R.'s promise in 1932 to balance the budget and Nixon as the exemplar of law-and-order. So what is left? Creating a favorable impression of what you would be like in office. That was campaigning, 1980-style: not issues, but attitudes; not character, but appearance. The result has been the development of parody news, which has earned the same status as real news...
True, the press still features triviality, gossip, scandal. It always will. Charles Anderson Dana of the New York Sun-like Hearst and Pulitzer quite a phrasemaker and an exemplar of the era-declared that the Sun could not be blamed for reporting what God had permitted to happen. That was only partly a copout. While the press should not pander to base or grisly appetites, or merely "give the people what they want," neither should it be expected to change human nature (if that concept is still admissible). America's mainstream publications today, for all their faults...
...that the anything has a dark and even unspeakable side-slum miseries, ghettos like the South Bronx burning themselves out, and horripilating parlors of decadence, catering to the most specialized of the perverse. Much of the rest of the nation regards New York as a cautionary tale, the urban exemplar of everything that can go wrong: poverty, pollution, crime, racial conflict, corrupt and stupid government, dirt, traffic, immorality and, no doubt, sinful pride...
That whiny, petulant exemplar of aching self-pity, Littlechap (Everyman writ exceeding small) is back on Broadway after 16 years of blissful absence. This time the wind-up toy clown is played by Sammy Davis Jr. As thimbleful-deep in wisdom as it is mountain-high in pretentiousness, this musical means to imply that he is life's clown, as aren...