Word: name-drop
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What I encountered in the first essay, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," was a magical world of thought that seemed to me wonderful but overly complex. After all, I had not even heard of Kant, much less been able to name-drop The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals in section. Yet despite all the references to Herder, Plato, Machiavelli and Voltaire, I detected some resonance in this history of ideas. What "a priori" meant I did not know, but the basic themes I understood. Berlin was saying that theories were wonderful stuff, great to think about and even more...
This, after all, is my final shot at becoming a true-blue. Harvard literati. (I just won't get another chance to name-drop Joseph Andrews and Walker Evans without someone throwing a brick at my head, will I? And most frighteningly of all, somewhere in the back of my mind, the thesis clock has started to tick--freedom will soon come crashing to an end, and long nights of genuine scholarship await. Sometime between now and unemployment, I've got to squeeze in some education...