Word: imperfection
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Imperfect Perfection. Piano tuning is difficult mainly because the piano is an imperfect musical instrument. It does not possess enough keys to play all the notes in music. (One key, for example, must do for both F sharp and G flat.) The compromise by which piano strings are tuned to represent musical tones that are close in pitch, but not identical, involves a mathematical theory of Einsteinian complexity.* Practically, the problem is to put the piano systematically and artistically out of tune, by equalizing the tonal distances between the black & white keys. In getting each note of the piano just...
Short, slender, tongue-cheeked Columnist Fisher quickly skirts the dangers to a free press inherent in mass misinformation and in mass-distributed opinion slanted to particular ends. He passes on to a detailed study of his voluble subjects-"faulty and imperfect souls, no matter what their clients believe." Some of the Fisher findings...
...Rhymes with idle. Literally "hair-nest," so called because hairs grow inside the cyst. A pi lonidal cyst is supposed to result from imperfect fusion of the two halves of a body in fetal life...
...parasite was actually Ernie's imperfect twin, the result of incomplete division of embryonic cells before Ernie was born. Imperfect twinning sometimes results in scarcely noticeable effects (a baby may be born with a small tumor containing teeth, hair, etc., showing that a twin was begun but not completed), or in Siamese twins...
...showing real or ostensible moral stature." In turn, that fact has led to steady progress toward "the golden mean which reconciles the necessary control of the modern state with the greatest feasible liberty of the individual." This Anglo-Saxon democracy, "like walking, is a continually arrested fall forward"-imperfect, surely, but the best there is and a wonderful thing at that. Concludes Baldwin: "Though the white race should disappear from the earth, yet if the American Negro and the Chinese carry on our ideals then England will be the spiritual home of man as truly as Greece is his intellectual...