Word: modicum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Cambridge firemen, arriving on a book-and-ladder truck and a fire engine, showed little appreciation of their undue summons and remarked to questioning Yardlings that they were merely on a practice run. "Five Yard policemen were present to preserve the remaining modicum of order among north-entry residents...
...deflecting of attention from one's own shortcomings by blaming and criticizing others. It is deplorably exemplified among Catholics by our all too prevalent antiSemitism. Catholics of this country are predominantly of recent immigrant stock. ... In the nature of the case, most of them have achieved but a modicum of 'American success' and therefore feel frustrated. They are all too ready to project reasons for their failures on the more vigorous-because more recent-wave of Jewish immigrants...
Coming just at the time when the conduct of labor and management indicates that these two groups have developed a modicum of responsibility extending beyond their own pocket-lining, the Hartley bill, passed by the House and awaiting Senate action, threatens to annul whatever facility in the art of resolving labor disputes has been acquired in the last decade. Opponents have charged that the bill is the product of spite and rancour. But even if it was framed with the best motives, the fact that it issued from a committee whose chairman was so interested in labor affairs that...
...discerning young Harvard man discovers, soon after moving into his college dwellings, that the angular, unpadded objects grandiosely labeled "room furnishings" offer excellent facilities for clothes-hanging and third degrees, but have few other practical uses. In order to secure a modicum of comfort he must supplement the University supplied furniture by making purchases in Cambridge or Boston. Unfortunately, furniture suitable to college rooms is not easily found and even when available can be acquired only by parting with a painfully large amount of money...
...half became concerned with ethical values, the realistic half with how to get ahead. Says Baldwin: ". . . Sound common sense taught him that in a practical world, while there might be some good, there must also be considerable evil and brutality; therefore God must agree to wink at a reasonable modicum of wickedness. Wars and a minimum of chicanery must be permitted, though the party of the second part agreed to find good moral reasons for them. . . . So Christianity has been an embalming fluid that has preserved the peasant virtues of England down to this generation...