Word: hobgoblin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Angeles even the ultimate title can seem a mere thing. The Lakers won the N.B.A. championship in 1980, 1982, 1985 and last season, but repeating consecutively had become the hobgoblin of the industry. Not even the Boston Celtics had done it in 19 years. For the Lakers, the chance to regard themselves as the Celtics, the Green Bay Packers and the New York Yankees came down to a seventh game, their third of the spring...
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." In striving to be fair to both sides, Cooper, in effect, supported the final clubs. The failed attempt of Mr. Cooper's `evenhandedness' suggests why the council must take a stand on important campus issues. The council cannot support both sides of a discrimination suit any more than the United States can support both sides in a war. Supporting both sides equally enforces the status...
...major point of controversy and local educators is the degree of state involvement in traditionally local decisions which the bill proposes--"the hobgoblin of consistency," according to Peterkin...
...harden into a monument, into mere required reading, or worse, the man superseded by Kurt Vonnegut on the course lists. Too many generations came to regard him as a chill, gnomic bore, the best of American aphorists, no doubt, but also the most relentless ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," "Traveling is a fool's paradise," "... fired the shot heard round the world," and even the 1960s' dreamy license, "Do your thing"). His fatally worthy subjects (Self-Reliance, Prudence, Friendship) have oppressed generations of eighth-grade English classes. People should probably be forbidden...
...logic. Are the Enu a race of mutants-survivors of a nuclear bomb experiment? Or are they the missing link-a throwback to the age of reptiles? Is the island paradise or purgatory? At different times, Lind has it both ways. Consistency, as he sees it, is the hobgoblin of those without other hobgoblins...