Word: fool
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Dates: during 1910-1919
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...Observatory, an expert and renowned man of science, denounces the "daylight saving" trick with the clock as a foolish and useless fiction. His opinion will have great weight and will carry conviction to the many who have hitherto regarded the scheme as a more or less successful plan to fool Mother Nature and her children at the same time...
...lecture was called "The Spirit of Touchstone," and in it, Mr. Noyes declared that "Hamlet was not mad, nor was he pretending to be mad; he was putting on the disposition of the Fool in order to strike at the insincerity and unreality of the world about him. Hamlet derived his disposition from his former friend, Yorrick, the court jester, which friendship is emphasized and illustrated in the play by Hamlet's sad reminiscences in the grave-digger's scene...
...With the sole exception of Hamlet, no other character in all of Shakspere's plays, who does not definitely take the part of a Fool, wears trappings, which were a part of the conventional garb of the Court Fool," declared Mr. Noyes. "This and numerous other instances throughout the play lead me to believe that Shakspere meant to typify in Harlet the 'Wise Fool' of the early English courts at his greatest point of development...
...Noyes believes that Hamlet, with his intellectual ecstacy, was merely an apotheosis of Shakspere's former creation. Touchstone the Fool. Mr. Noyes maintained that it is difficult to conceive how critics could support the madness of Hamlet in the face of the fact that Shakspere himself ridicules other characters in the play for holding this same belief. In their swift, subtle phrases, modified by infinite jest and exquisite fancy, Hamlet and Touchstone can be identified as one and the same creation; and their further loyalty to love, and love for worship, seal their close relationship...
...enough? The punishment meted out in Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" has always seemed to us eminently fitting; yet we had never thought the mere non-Latinist deserved such a brand. But perhaps it is for the benefit of the public. Peter Barnum said the public liked to be fooled; and we certainly fool the public with our pompous scientific degree. Meanwhile, the initiated know that the yellow crow's-foot indicates "not knowledge of science, but ignorance of Latin"; and they wonder even at the steadfastness of tradition...