Word: inventive
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Certainly, everyone has heard these arguments before. But the way we compensate for this luxury may be even worse. We invent for ourselves a false liberalism--one of Foucault and excessively correct speech, not one of the inner city and poverty. We talk about past injustices, not about the ones happening today--ones we allow to continue. We talk about how to refer to female police officers, rather than how to make the police a more effective force. Newspapers write about racial diversity, but rarely talk about economic diversity...
...after all, the knowledge that there will still be a world tomorrow, in which to apply what scholars discover and invent today, that is the single most important motivation for the scholar's continued existence. It scandalizes Harvard that members of its faculty greet Powell not with the respect and gratitude he deserves for his role in securing the peace we enjoy today, but rather with egotistical, shrill demands for a change in policy which, realistically, he cannot support...
...life didn't. He went on to serve in Vietnam as an adviser to a Vietnamese regiment in the Delta during the Tet offensive. Then he got a degree at Oxford. He worked for a few months as a reporter at the Washington Post, then quit to invent himself again, this time truthfully, as a fiction writer...
...temporary worker, of the consultant and subcontractor, of the just-in-time work force -- fluid, flexible, disposable. This is the future. Its message is this: You are on your own. For good (sometimes) and ill (often), the workers of the future will constantly have to sell their skills, invent new relationships with employers who must, themselves, change and adapt constantly in order to survive in a ruthless global market...
...words with which people and things are named have a changeful magic. Some cultures invent different names for people in different stages of life. In Chinese tradition a boy of school age would be given a "book name," to be used in arranging marriages and other official matters. A boy's book name might be "Worthy Prince" or "Spring Dragon" or "Celestial Emolument." (Does a father say, "Hello, have you met my boy, Celestial Emolument...