Word: oxonian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Never before, as far as the oldest Old Oxonian could recall, had the University Congregation been convened during the "Long Vac." But last week, with almost a month of vacation still ahead, the Hebdomadal Council (Oxford's "cabinet") summoned a special session of Congregation (the academic legislature). To the black-gowned, curious dons, Dean John Lowe of Christ Church broke an exciting piece of news...
Oxford, he wrote (signing himself simply "Oxonian"), had become a hotbed of fascism. "Rather smart young men" with a taste for "fast cars and camel-hair coats" were displaying the books of Sir Oswald Mosley on their tables. They could be heard saying at their private binges that "soon we shall all have to be fascists, whether we like...
...Greenness of Grass. What had happened to Oxford-or that splinter of it that "Oxonian" had stubbed his toe on? "Oxonian" thought one man was largely to blame-a wan and wispy philosopher named Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer. Ayer's book, Language, Truth and Logic, had "acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible" at Oxford. It insisted that "value judgments" of beauty and goodness were, philosophically speaking, nonsense. They were moral sentiments, not facts at all. Such heresies, "Oxonian" thought, left no place for human values, created the moral void fascism required...
...once the letters column of the New Statesman bristled with arguments pro & con Freddie Ayer. Did his philosophy really lead to fascism? One professional philosophizer who sided with "Oxonian" was bush-bearded C.E.M. Joad. To accept Ayer's assumptions, wrote Joad, would be to agree "that there is no meaning in the universe . . . that it means nothing to say that Beethoven is a greater musician than Mr. Sinatra . . . that all talk about God ... is twaddle...
Ayer thinks that "Oxonian's" fuss about fascism is "extremely stupid." All he wants to do, he says, is to distinguish between sentiment and fact; the fascists were forever confusing the two. That sounded all right, in a way-but most Britons didn't like the sound...