Word: gothicisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Jonahs as well as Ahabs go looking for their private whales. Abe Rogoff is a middle-aged Jonah just asking to be swallowed. For ten years he has been a snickering outsider ("to take business seriously is a kind of disease") camouflaged as a docile insider in the pseudo-Gothic spires of Manhattan's Tower Mutual Life Insurance Co. Abe's disease might be diagnosed as undulant barricade fever, the nostalgic complaint of an ex-free-lover, ex-radical newspaper editor and ex-Wobbly. The newest totalitarianism, Abe decides, is Total Security. As the whale of social conformity...
Thus to my Hegelian sensibility, the pendulum theory appears an arbitrary construct. Western culture incorporates not only Biblical and Hellenic elements, but also Gothic. It takes up parts of these traditions and discards others. The classical Renaissance did not simply resurrect the Ancients in their old form. Gibbon dressed his Romans and his Christians as neo-classicists, and while Hellenism dominated the synthesis, it did not emerge pure. Consequently, it hardly seems likely that the impending transformation will be accomplished with a religion designed for the Hellenic Babel...
Memorial Hall loomed large before 900 hesitant and expectant freshmen on the morning of September 21, 1928, as they filed before "the huge Gothic pile" to register as members of the Class of 1932. The eyes of Burke and Chatham looked severely down upon them, the jealous gargoyles stared angrily at the Yard behind them, and the clangor of the bell seemed to make time itself revert to the 19th century as they enrolled...
...toward the flesh, into the bulbous and ascetic shapes of medieval art. "The very degradation the body has suffered as a result of Christian morality served to sharpen its erotic impact. The formula of the classical ideal had been more protective than any drapery; whereas the shape of the Gothic body, which suggested that it was normally clothed, gave it the impropriety of a secret." Ergo, a rebirth of interest in the human form as a subject of art in the Renaissance, although with a different view of man implicit in every muscle, for the Renaissance--especially the Michelangelo--nude...
...only hours before Castillo Armas' successful uprising broke out in 1954. New York-born Dubois speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese, travels 100,000 miles a year from his base in Panama as a roving reporter and Hemisphere drumbeater for the Trib. His reporting is sometimes ponderous in the Gothic provincial style approved by the late Colonel Bertie Mc-Cormick (who discovered Dubois when he was working oh the Panama Star & Herald), but it is always authoritative and accurate. And among newsmen, Dubois' scorn for censors-and his ingenuity in outwitting them-has made him a legendary figure...