Word: mistakenness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
People who monopolize lanes for hours by swimming endless lengths side-stroke in the mistaken belief that they are exercising should use the small pool when the big pool is crowded. (They should also read a little paperback entitled Aerobics). Most swimmers get excellent exercise by swimming hard for 10 to 20 minutes, so that the turnover of swimmers may be more rapid...
...doubt about what else we feel. Anger, once justly listed among the seven deadly sins, today is becoming one of our most praised values. In raising anger to an emotional ideal, we have gravely misgauged the limited utility of adrenaline's quick flashes. In art, anger is regularly mistaken for sincerity, if not inspiration. One is advised to peddle one's cool art with a hot sell. A masochistic public quivers deliciously not only before the real fire of the Genets, the Becketts and the Mailers but before the plastic brimstone of their less gifted imitators...
...book is a mosaic of fascinating vignettes, both ghastly and ridiculous. Railway workers were allowed to abandon the otherwise mandatory Heil Hitler arm salute because it was mistaken for a signal and caused accidents. Goethe's favorite oak tree near Weimar became the central point around which the Buchenwald extermination camp was built. In one village, a neighbor told a mother that the name of her missing soldier son had been read on a list of German P.O.W.s held by the Russians. Far from being grateful, the mother thereupon denounced her well-meaning informant to the authorities for listening...
...sheer technological innovation, however, nothing aboard Apollo 15 quite beats NASA's new I.RV (for Lunar Roving Vehicle), more commonly known as the "moon rover." Tucked away in the side of Falcon, the collapsible, 10-ft.-long jumble of aluminum tubing, wire and rods might easily be mistaken for a Rube Goldbergian version of an old-fashioned foldaway Murphy bed. Actually, it is one of the most unusual and expensive cars ever built (cost of the moon buggy program: $37.8 million...
With such a title, Robert Coles could at first be mistaken for one of the people he desperately deplores-that complacent horde of pigeonholers, polltakers, politicians, consumer experts and scholars who seem bent on reducing vast groups of individual Americans to some neatly labeled lowest common denominator of fear, status, greed or need. Coles, after all, is a Harvard psychiatrist. He has been seen in the company of notebook and tape recorder. For more than a decade he has studied and written voluminously about troubled children, blacks, migrant workers-all subjects that are now ritually lamented in near-faceless collectivity...