Word: naivete
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Widow is neither a gracefully composed elegy nor a profound essay on grief. It threatens more than once to be a nonbook. But its very ordinariness gives Mrs. Caine's account its value. She has the naiveté and courage to pose the specific questions. How (and how not) to tell the children? "Get them to ask questions," she advises, and don't try to be "clinical" or "dispassionate." Instead, show your own grief, encourage them to cry. How (and how not) to write letters of condolence? "Praise is wonderfully welcome," she emphasizes, and so is "a little...
...record that pleases its members, an eclectic group drawn from print and broadcast journalism as well as the law, civil rights and other fields.* Executive Director William Arthur, a former editor of Look, blames the council's slow beginnings on public ignorance of its existence and on the naiveté of early complaints. "Too many of them had to do with editorial opinion rather than accuracy," he says. "Bias is not something we handle." Associate Director Ned Schnurman concedes that only "about seven" of the council's 34 cases thus far have been "significant." But he adds...
Perhaps parapsychology's most gullible proponent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the superrationalist detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle remains the greatest proof that intelligence and scruple cannot compete with naiveté and the desire to accept the paranormal as demonstrable fact. After the death of his son in the Great War, he turned to spiritualism for solace. This led, in time, to investigations of spirits, and eventually to little winged creatures in the bottoms of gardens. In his 1922 volume The Coming of the Fairies, Doyle reproduced photographs of a tiny goblin and elves caught by a child...
That statement indicates not naiveté but subtle strategy. The Arabs fully appreciate that Rotterdam is the critical conduit for oil to Northern Europe. By singling out the Dutch, they are able to menace all of Europe while officially punishing only one nation. By allowing the continued-though significantly reduced-flow of oil through the Dutch port, they prevent total European collapse (which they do not want) while gaining more efficient control over that flow than if they had to track down where each barrel of their oil is going. Just as easily as they wink at the subterfuge, they...
...claims to a twice-Promised Land, so much death and grief and hurt a part of existence to both peoples, so real their fears and so inescapable their hostility, that outsiders who arrive there to talk of evenhandedness, fair-mindedness and rational solutions find themselves instantly suspect for their naiveté. The most egregious assumption that outsiders make is that their detachment gives them superior wisdom. In fact, the intractable problems of the Middle East have been endlessly considered and eloquently argued on both sides. In candid private moments, Israeli leaders can discuss Arab rights and needs with sympathy...