Word: foolishly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inevitable comparisons with Chekhov and Congreve. No, he would recast Lear as Captain Shotover, a wily old man of the sea, sensitive to every political current, each distant drumroll of thunder on the cloudless eve of the Great War. Surrounding the Captain are his two bewitching daughters, with their foolish suitors, and one young woman, Ellie Dunn, who is wise and innocent enough to read the Captain's prophetic mind. In Shaw's Lear, Cordelia has a divine madness...
Customers, however, were not concerned with the particulars of the sale, but with the continued quality of the ice cream. When asked if quality would decline. Crugnale responded. "That's foolish. Each store makes its own ice cream, and the new owners are not going to change that...
...equivalent represent the best we can hope for says Eban. Such an agreement among the Superpowers to cooperate where they can and keep differences towards tolerable and non-lethal proportions with the faint hope that the goodwill from the former occasionally seeps into the latter. It is foolish, Eban warns, to imagine Soviet designs for global hegemony. It wants to be treated like a superpower but is governed by a self-interest that will induce it to caution in world affairs. What really went wrong with detente in the 1970's was not the unsoundness of the idea...
Such verbal knee jerks might be dismissed as harmless. But they never were by Orwell. "The slovenliness of our language," he wrote in 1946, "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." And it is a surpassing irony that the title Orwell made famous has become a symptom of the very sloppiness he deplored: what he called a "Meaningless Word," a ramshackle abstraction inviting everyone to come in and stop thinking for a while...
...think that's plain foolish. The idea of having diplomatic relations is to be able to communicate. And the time when you dispense with diplomatic relations is when you have given up on the idea of communication and when you are seeking other means to settle your problems. I don't like a world in which we're seeking other means to settle our problems...