Word: might-have-been
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Still, Stampp is not of the might-have-been school. He wants to reorient our view toward a crucial and misunderstood era in history. And he succeeds. For he persuasively demonstrates that the pains of Reconstruction were only a symptom, not a cause, of the American dilemma, that the Radical Republicans were the precursors both of modern liberals and of Gilded Age politicos...
...fairly systematic-at the same rate as in the pre-drug years, there would now be 82,000 more patients confined in mental hospitals. "Instead," said Dr. Kline, "there has been an actual decrease of 54,000 patients, giving a difference of 136,000 persons." The care of these might-have-been patients over eight years would have cost more than $1 billion, Dr. Kline estimates; building hospitals to house the newcomers would have cost $2 billion more. Alongside such figures, the cost of the drugs and of drug research is "very modest indeed...
...Pure Reason. Not so. Many of Ran som's gentle verses deal in genteel terms with subjects easily apprehended by the lingering tea-and-antimacassar set in Ransom's own home town of Pulaski, Tenn. His topics run to ceremonious family occasions, chivalric legends, brief encounters between might-have-been lovers, small social events, the death of a boy, even the demise of a child's pet hen that has been stung to death...
After studying the facsimile intensively and "thinking myself into Mahler's mind." Musicologist Cooke decided that he could see "the absolute coherence of the complete master plan. What I had deciphered was not a 'might-have-been' but an 'almost-is': five full-length movements in various states of textural completion, but all sufficiently coherent to add up to a magnificent Symphony in F Sharp; a symphony in two parts." Cooke's BBC version runs 65 minutes and according to his own complex figuring, the various edited parts of it are anywhere from...
...Ship, the last movie he made. Comedian Kovacs plays Bugsy F. Foglemayer, a might-have-been menace who has plenty of big ideas but unfortunately keeps them in an itsy-bitsy brain. "I'm a unsussessful crinimal," Bugsy sighs, "because I had a unhappy childhood. My parents didn't understand me. I spoke English, they spoke Hungarian." To win success and "get my name on the front page of every history book," Bugsy resolves to commit "the greatest crime of the censury"-a $3,000,000 bank robbery in Boston...