Word: getting
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...scholarly tastes and habits, its eager friendships and quick hatreds, its keen debates, its frank discussions of character, and of deep political and religious questions, - all are safeguards against sloth, vulgarity, and depravity. Its society, and not less its solitudes, are full of teaching. Shams, conceit, and fictitious distinctions get no mercy. There is nothing but ridicule for bombast and sentimentality. Repression of genuine sentiment and emotion is, indeed, in this College, carried too far. Reserve is more respectable than any undiscerning communicativeness. But neither Yankee shamefacedness nor English stolidity is admirable. This point especially touches you, young...
...used to get off pointless jokes...
...this is the fault. Boys are taught that fine and showy recitations are the great criterion of their learning. They are marked, perhaps, a failure for omission of one preposition in a list of thirty exceptions; get into their heads, that there is only one translation of every passage, - that arma in Arma virumque cano means arms, but never realize but that it must mean arms everywhere; finally, take down translations given by instructors in class as so many isolated facts, and, may we add, believe implicitly in Harkness's Grammar. They get a good fit, as it is commonly...
...some good certainly, but how great in America is questionable. That some change is needed is clear. The Universities and Colleges have been steadily raising the standard of admission, and increased exertion is required of the student who wishes to go through college at all, and far more to get through with any distinction or practical benefit...
...then we get the right good from a book...