Word: heroicize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With an M.A. and Ph.D. in educational psychology--and a winning reputation--Osborne had both the vision and the credentials to do something about it. "It dawned on me that we had a pretty good level of character among the players, and because they are heroic figures to young people, they could make a difference in their lives," he says. Along with his wife Nancy, the coach initiated a mentoring program called TeamMates, pairing 25 of his Cornhuskers with 25 children. The goal was to have these college athletes-cum-mentors stay with their charges from the kids' first year...
...Espy had abided by the first-black rules, meeting the standards for Cabinet officers would have been easy. But in this day and age, that would have been asking a lot. Instead, he tried to be like the other Mike: so heroic at his work that even an overzealous prosecutor like Smaltz would forgive him a few nitpicking ethical lapses. As Espy ruefully admitted last week, that was a miscalculation. He said, "I should have tried to be more like Jackie." That's a good motto for all public officials, even if they're not black...
Gates is the Bing Crosby of American technology, borrowing a tune here and a tune there and turning them all into great boffo hits--by dint of heroic feats of repackaging and sheer Herculean blandness. Granted he is (to put it delicately) an unusually hard-driving and successful businessman, but the Bill Gates of our imagination is absurdly overblown...
...time hunting seemed heroic: a test of manliness, a mythic pageant, a recreational surrogate for war. Ernest Hemingway was savagely, sometimes childishly competitive for trophy animals. The '60s brought a shift, and Vietnam a sort of anti-Hemingway revulsion. Michael Cimino's 1978 movie The Deer Hunter ended with the hero lowering his rifle, declining to kill a good-looking buck that, before Vietnam, he would happily have slaughtered...
Rarely is human society graced by a person whose heroic courage and raw emotional power move so many people that he threatens to crumble the walls of injustice. Three years ago, the free world was shocked when the Nigerian military dictatorship executed one such hero, the Ogoni Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Ogoni people of Nigeria live in an oil-rich and once-fertile land, but they are a national minority susceptible to governmental abuse...