Word: leitmotiv
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Canadians know Mitch Hepburn as the Liberal Premier of Ontario, a tough, loud-talking self-made politico on the lines of the late Huey Long, whose political leitmotiv is making ill-tempered cracks at the leader of the Dominion's Liberal Party, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. They know him as a onetime pal of Quebec's smalltime "fascist" Maurice Duplessis, but now 110% for all aid to Britain. They know him as a perennial dark horse who, because of his enmity to King, can never be counted on to take the leading role in the Canadian...
...understand how these three men have dominated our thinking, says Author Barzun, try to imagine our speech without terms like survival of the fittest, struggle for existence, natural selection, exploitation of labor, dialectic materialism, scientific socialism, social significance, Nordic culture, music drama, leitmotiv, the twilight of the gods...
From each of these isms, says Author Barzun, people learned that "the riddle of the Sphinx had been solved." The solution might be a little technical and complicated. "Yet at bottom lay a simple principle" - the survival of the fittest, the theory of value and surplus value, the leitmotiv and its function. "The public could thus enjoy the double pleasure of simpleness and profundity. . . . Physical struggle led to survival, physical labor to value, physical object to musical theme, and at the end each system yielded the most exalted objects of contemplation; the adaptation of living forms; a perfect state...