Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...only other subjects of concern in a relatively quiet year also sound vaguely familiar to more modern ears--the rising cost of attending Harvard, and the lack of adequate medical facilities. Faced with high tuition and service charges under depression conditions, many concluded that, while its President spoke about an "aristocracy of brains," Harvard was rapidly developing into an aristocracy of wealth...
...flood of discontent and self-depreciation these days" and the "mythology of the mass media--a mythology of pride, greed, and envy." To deal with this deplorable situation, Murray urged the formation of a new mythology, to be embodied in a "truly new testament," a kind of Bible for modern times...
Like the Christian Bible, such a book might contain a wide variety of legends, poems, songs of praise, and parables. It would differ from the Christian Bible, however, in that it would be "consonant with modern science...
...what Author Packard observes is old hat, such as the upper-class preference for old hats over flashy new ones. He over-generalizes. One dubious example: Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry like to point to their past by living in Early American, white clapboard houses, while Jews prefer modern architecture, since no one would credit them with an Early American ancestry anyway. And, searching for meanings, he wildly overinterprets. Example: American women do not like to ride motorcycles because, perched on the back seat, they would have to assume a position secondary to the male. (The real explanation just might...
...times Packard is patently misinformed, as when he asserts that class structures are more flexible in Britain than in the U.S., and he over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...