Word: monumentalize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thus a monument to the conquest of polio faithful to the facts would consist of not one man in a white lab coat but two of them glaring at each other. Both Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin could and did make convincing cases for themselves and pretty good ones against each other too. But since the public usually prefers one hero to two, and since Salk did get there first, he got the monument...
Just as some politicians are at their best when running for office, so Salk came into his own as a spokesman for vaccination. Although it is generally accepted in the field that the real man on the monument should be Enders (who in 1954 shared the only Nobel Prize given for polio research), it seems unlikely that either he or the pugnacious Sabin would have performed half so patiently as Salk the ceremonial chores expected of monuments or would have sat so politely through so many interviews and spread the gospel of disease prevention quite so far and wide...
...star academic, although she did attend Temple University and managed to raise seven daughters who all hold University degrees. She's not a celebrity, although when she points out the history of her house in Roxborough, a house my great-grandparents built, it feels like a monument. But it isn't, because Grammy is not a millionaire. Neither is my grandfather, although for some reason Harvard pursues them both with enough vigor for her to remark to me about how sorry she is she can't give. Then we laugh...
...some of its most purely joyful and (we must be honest) embarrassingly goofy. A recent four-CD boxed set annotated his masterpiece, the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, with countless versions of the original 13 tracks as well as just-let-the-tape-roll session outtakes: a monument both to the richness of Wilson's music and, by virtue of the fact that someone thought this was a commercial project, to the hard devotion that music still inspires...
...Monument Street, several blocks north, the brooding gray Old Manse boasts an equally rich literary pedigree and original furnishings to match. Emerson, who lived there in 1834-1835, began writing his first great essay, "Nature," in the second-floor study. Hawthorne lived there with his beloved bride Sophia from 1842 to 1845, writing Mosses from an Old Manse. On windows throughout the house, Sophia used her diamond wedding ring to etch words of joy about her marriage and the beauty that surrounded her, including the ice-draped trees outside that she described as "glass chandeliers." The vegetable garden...