Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...odd how we associate "high culture" with antiquity. Take wine, for instance, a symbol associated with the upper classes of old. Good wine is always old wine; new wine, mere fermented grape juice. Even vintage, another word for classic, is derived from the Latin word for wine. However, old items are not always palatable on first try. Hence, true appreciation often needs to be cultivated. Only then has one developed taste and an appreciation of the finer, more delicate and intellectual side of life...
...Odd that the republic chooses to renew itself in the dead of winter. From George Washington's first Inaugural in late April 1789 the ceremony was pushed back to early March, and from F.D.R. to the present it has been locked in this hard, white burial vault of a month. The Dakotas, frozen thick for weeks, sent an ice wind east for the occasion, but it thawed a bit by Monday. The government bundled up before the fluted columns like an ice sculpture at a wedding--an impressive, preposterous construction molded to take one's mind off the reality that...
...Brits so taken with the American canon? As odd as it may seem to some Anglophiles, they find the work superior to much of what British theater is turning out these days. "The Americans offer us something we don't get in contemporary British plays," says David Thacker, director of the National's Death of a Salesman and a longtime champion of Arthur Miller's work. "They are very emotionally powerful plays--they reach the heart as well as the head. They are psychologically profound and truthful. And the best are strong on narrative. We'd have to look back...
...seems odd to us, we'll go back to the professor," said Montgomery. "But we've learned pretty quickly that Harvard professors mean what they...
...Gingrich-esque nostalgic diatribe. Nor do I mean to present an overly romanticized portrait of Main Street USA complete with smiling postman and a penny candy store. Rather, in an age when the preservation, maintenance and respect of cultures are exalted in academia and elsewhere, I find it odd that the American small town has not been privileged with the same endangered status afforded to other components of American multiculturalism. If we are not careful, gossipy barber shops and other Main Street institutions will find themselves relegated to historical theme parks. For now, only one of Chappaqua's original three...