Word: figment
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...matter what sports writers say, there is no actual Ivy League. But the figment took a half-step toward fact last week. The presidents of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale signed an expanded version of an old Harvard-Princeton-Yale agreement-no "athletic scholarships," no first-year men or scholastic delinquents on varsity teams, no post-season games-in short, strictly antiseptic amateur football. Members are not required to play each other, and no formal championship will be at stake. Far from forming a league comparable to the Big Ten, the ivy-covered institutions were merely...
...feeling of superiority. There are different social strata among the Mexicans even as among the Texans, which the Texans, with all their recognition of the economic necessity of the various strata, recognize. But as to their lumping all Mexicans together in "extreme intolerable racial discrimination," that is a pure figment of imagination...
Umbriago, whom Durante calls "that lifelong chum," is partly a creation of Jimmy's far-fetching imagination and partly a figment of Italian folklore. The folklore Umbriago is a friendly, lusty, happy little man who is always the life of the party, and Jimmy is sure he knows what he looks like (see cover). But in Jimmy's comedy, Umbriago may assume many shapes-clarinetist, bank president, farmer-according to whatever mischief Durante is up to. Umbriago is also at war. One U.S. Army paratroop division has abandoned the classic paratrooper cry Geronimo! in favor of Umbriago...
...myths that we have come to associate with Columbus, yet it does so in a light-hearted vein. Columbus did not have to convince the authorities that the world was round (they had known it long before); the story of Columbus and his egg was probably a figment of the imagination of a later writer; it is untrue that the invention of the astrolabe enabled Columbus to discover America--he didn't know how to use it then. Professor Morison can write beautiful prose, yet he employs colloquial language to good effect ("All in all, it seems to me that...
According to the Great I Am, Bill Miller does not exist. This is rather hard to believe when you look at him, because his wrestler-like body most certainly does not look like a figment of your imagination. But the fact remains that, so far as I Am is concerned, he is just not there...