Word: harsher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adult criminals presumably face harsher punishment than do juveniles. But some delinquents in Houston don't believe that. When arrested, scores of Harris County youngsters in the past year have falsely claimed to be at least 17. Those who were not caught in the lie spent less time locked up than they would have if they had admitted being younger...
That is open to debate. Some columnists point out that there is little one can say today that can ruin a person. Extramarital affairs, divorce, children out of wedlock are no longer utterly shocking (though they may bring harsher judgments on politicians than, say, screen stars, because indiscretions call character and judgment into question). "There is no one today who has the power of, say, Louella Parsons," observes novelist Nora Ephron. "Those people could really punish you." When Parsons revealed in 1949 that Ingrid Bergman had left her husband for director Roberto Rossellini, the scandal kept her from making movies...
...writing, for the most part, is uninspired. A harsher critic might say that it is just plain dull. Almost never does a sentence in How Harvard Rules cry out to be read...
...renegade street music back in the mid-1970s. Turned off by the blandness of disco and the slickness of rhythm and blues, disk jockeys in black dance clubs began manipulating their turntables to blend instrumental riffs from different songs, dragging the needle across a record to create an even harsher sound. While these brash mixes played, M.C.s, or rappers, would exhort the crowd with chants: "When I die, bury me deep;/ Put two speakers at my feet,/ A mixer at my head,/ So that when you close the casket/ I can rock the dead...
...what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before him, saw the natural world as a pyramid of unity, "one great whole animated by the breath of life" -- cooperative within its prodigious variety, with more room for God than allowed by Darwin's harsher scheme of battle and chance variation. The artist must see like a scientist; the scientist, alert to the lessons of the sublime, like an artist...