Word: notionalism
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...While it’s often noted that athletics are big business, many people continue to hold on to the notion that professional sports is just a game. This is the basis for so many fan complaints about exorbitant salaries, increased commercialization, and deteriorating moral standards in today’s sporting world. But if professional sports was “just a game” as they say, then big conference colleges and prep high schools wouldn’t be sending scouts to under-15 basketball games, and 13-year-olds wouldn’t be getting offered...
Iowa's decision was not only pro-Obama, but very clearly anti-Clinton - not so much anti-Hillary, whose solid, steadfast campaign earned the respect of many Iowans, but anti restoration, anti the notion of having a former two-term President elide the Constitution by returning to the White House as a spouse, anti the petty, contentious politics that seems to follow the Clintons - much to their dismay - everywhere they go. (Except, perhaps, the corridors of the Senate, which may ultimately prove to be Senator Clinton's most natural home...
There are presidential candidates for virtually every taste, yet citizens find the menu inadequate. They tell pollsters they are discontented with the selection and generally sick of politics and politicians. In part, they are just being polite. The notion that people hate politics and that politicians are all phonies is so ingrained that to tell a pollster that, yeah, politicians are O.K. and the system is not so bad would almost be a violation of democratic etiquette...
Elephants, whose memory is often celebrated, have also been thought by some experts to hold grudges. But "grudge" may be the wrong word - and it's not exactly a scientific term. More tenable than the notion of animals bearing grudges is the theory that they suffer stress. A 2005 paper in the journal Nature examined what some scientists called an "elephant breakdown" in Africa, and argued that elephants that had randomly attacked rhinoceroses were behaving pathologically. They were, the scientists suggested, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder - terminology usually reserved for humans - responding to years of hardship, inflicted by people...
...name's Disease," as a character says in the Tom Stoppard play Rock 'n' Roll). But that ordeal turns out to be the work of but a month, not decades - just long enough for the brother and sister to learn the cleansing importance of family solidarity. The notion that terminal illness is mainly an opportunity for elevating lessons on the meaning of life, and not a debilitating slog for all concerned, is proof that Hollywood is still in the unreality business...