Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...book is so simply written that any reader may grasp its hopeless message; and even those who furiously reject Eliot's thoroughly reactionary and dogmatic conclusions will be bound to agree that he has forced them into the healthy exercise of having to think furiously, too. Eliot's Notes starts by challenging people who use the word "culture" without ever pausing to think of what it means. To the average citizen, culture is a handy catchall into which to dump the arts, education, plumbing, science and any other pursuits that seem to be elements of modern civilization...
Thus, says Eliot, is the grand total of the word culture smashed into bits and pieces of semitruths. To reassemble it and grasp its full significance, he insists, the western world must first realize that all aspects of culture are not only related to each other but must overlap and interlock in such a way that they form a living whole...
Culture, Eliot holds, can be passed on by men primarily through their children, because only through the family can people grasp another important element of culture-"Piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote." So, in Eliot's opinion, if an "elite" does not become a rooted upper class, it cannot have any real cultural value; to enemies of aristocracy Eliot says that though in a class system many aristocrats fail to live up to their ancestors' high calling, a precious handful may be relied upon to fulfill the obligations of their...
Good-natured, ineffectual Harry Woodring, an Oxford Grouper and an isolationist, seemed unable to grasp the imminence of war, proved to be an ineffective Secretary. Harry Woodring's inaction and Louis Johnson's burning desire for the job precipitated a three-year running feud between the two top men in the War Department...
...spring term series of free concerts. In a program which was too long and too varied, no one would have missed the Beethoven March, nor did the somewhat uninspired rendition of Mozart's Sonata in D Major justify its inclusion. Pianists Robert Cornman and Leonid Hambro showed their grasp of the nineteenth century, however, in Schubert's Eight Variations, which predicted the styles of his successors with remarkable accuracy...