Word: layman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...book communicates more than it does; to "explain" the Greeks, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Renoir, Picasso forces a certain glibness, even what seems like a comparatively limited aspect of art history. For if he enlarges the context of his critism perhaps too ambitiously, although on the surface and to the layman, the result is entirely happy...
...relaxation. Vice President Simon Ramo is a striking opposite. Though equally trim (5 ft. 10½ in., 158 Ibs.), he is flamboyant and mercurial, takes mambo lessons for relaxation. Wooldridge marshals his thoughts carefully, is all business and lucidity, can make abstruse technical problems easily understandable to a layman; Ramo speaks impulsively, lets his thoughts bounce around like an errant light beam...
...first time, the physicist's lecture hit at a level inaccessible to many members of the audience. Dealing with the problems that arise in the formulation of concepts at the base of atomic physics, he seemed to some to deal with material above the scientific level of the average layman, and below that of people who have been trained in science...
...meaning of the Feast of Lupercal (a Roman fertility rite*), but he walks in fear of Father Alphonsus McSwiney, Dean of Discipline, a clerical careerist and bully whose belief it is that "no boy [is] stouter than a good cane" and that a man is, after all, only a layman. Dev knows less about fertility rites than the boys. At 37, he has never made love to a woman ("It was the education in Ireland, dammit, he had said it many a time ... it was a matter of ignorance, pure and simple...
...agility made them favorites in the lofty Catholic society surrounding the papal court. Back in the U.S. once again, Pierce taught English at a Catholic college in Louisiana, suffered with his wife through the loss of their small son. At the college he was an "amateur among professionals, a layman among priests." Abruptly, Pierce told Cornelia of his new ambition: to be a priest. He presented his soul-rending corollary to the decision: Cornelia must become...