Word: gist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such eras. The European balance of power system was one. It lasted through centuries of wars of increasing devastation until competition between nations destroyed the continent in two world wars. The respective “Warring States” periods of China and Japan furnish more lessons, the gist of which is summarized in their names. Contrast these worlds with Pax Romana, Pax Britannia and now, Pax Americana. That war between major states today is unthinkable does not prove that the nature of international relations has fundamentally changed, only that the United States has more military power than any conceivable...
...taking on Iraq, a simple question is being ignored. Forget about the economic motivations; they're a way of life. What course of action would result in the greatest good for the greatest number? The notion that the end justifies the means may be a little simplistic, but the gist is right. While we enjoy the freedoms and relative financial comforts afforded us by our various Western governments, let us not forget that those freedoms were fought for and bought with blood--not by us but by those with enough conviction to heed the call to action...
Chances are you haven't read the Bush Administration's "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace." Since it weighs in at a hefty 65 pages, who can blame you? Still, a surprising amount of the draft report is aimed at home-computer owners. Here's the gist: the more dependent we become on the Internet, the more damage can be done by taking down large portions of it. And it doesn't take a criminal genius to realize that PC users, with their increasingly high-speed connections and low-grade security setups, are the easiest on-ramp for any kind...
When it comes to demagoguery, graphics are paramount, as some current covers of Islamic Jihad magazines from Pakistan's Markaz Ad-Da'wah Wal Irshad (Center for Preaching) demonstrate. The Voice of Islam, left, is helpfully published in English, but even those not fluent in Urdu could get the gist of the magazines' tone from the 1950s B-movie graphics and the copious use of shadowy typefaces. Just in case, we have provided some translation as well...
Somehow, though, both in his translations of the Odes and other work, Ferry manages to convey the poetic gist of the original. Robert Frost famously noted, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But, as Ferry makes so clear, Frost was only half correct, for poetry functions on two levels. The first is its purely linguistic pleasures—poetry is distillation of language creation, and all of its linguistic uniqueness is lost when it is translated. To whatever extent a poetic translation is linguistically pleasing, it is entirely due to the work...