Word: notions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...confronted by an outburst of opposition from left-leaning elements in his party about the wisdom of breaking with the Social Democrats. And Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the Christian Social Union, the Christian Democratic Union's sister party in Bavaria, raised his thunderous voice against the notion of merging with the Free Democrats. Insisting that "a marriage without love" was not destined to endure, Strauss issued a "nonnegotiable" demand for national elections by the end of the year. He expected that the Christian Democrats would win a majority, allowing them to rule alone...
...NOTION OF DESIGNER UNDERWEAR strikes many people as more than a trifle silly. These people contend that the significance of the "designer" in designer clothes, whether manifest in a signature, a monogram or an animal insignia, is sheer status, and they are correct. They further reason that unless you are grossly inept or the subject of peculiar conspiracies by your peers, almost no one ever sees your underwear. The act of communicating status through clothes relies on visual verification. If you can't see Mr. Jones's skivvies, they can't impress you. And if he whispered to you across...
...virtually disintegrated during the campus upheavals of the 1960s, when millions of students demanded and won the right to get academic credit for studying whatever they pleased. There were courses in soap opera and witchcraft. Even more fundamental, and even more damaging, was the spread of the "egalitarian" notion that everybody was entitled to a college degree, and that it was undemocratic to base that degree on any differentiations of intellect or learning. "The idea that cosmetology is just as important as physics is still with us but is being challenged," says Curtis...
...methods that have advanced civilizations since the dawn of human intelligence ... if all those things are irrelevant, then boy, are we irrelevant!" DeLattre is a philosopher by training, and he offers one definition that has an ominous but compelling reverberation in the thermonuclear age: "Don't forget the notion of an educated person as someone who would understand how to refound his or her own civilization...
This is an approach that appears to attach more importance to the process of learning than to the substance of what is learned but it does provide a way of coping with the vast increase of knowledge. "The old notion of the generalist who could comprehend all subjects is an impossibility, and it was even in past ages," says Chicago's Gray. "Renaissance humanism concentrated on social living and aesthetic engagement but left out most of science. To know all about today's physics, biology and mathematics, or even the general principles of all these fields would...