Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...something of a paradox that freshmen who have not fenced until their first year here usually develop into the best varsity competitors. This happens simply because fencers who begin the sport in preparatory schools often find that early habits hamper them in perfecting the style which suits Marion...
Monkeyshining Paradox. Emily, by impersonating the bride, thoughtfully intervenes to save Fatigay from marriage to the heartless Amy. ("Marriage between cousins is perfectly legal," says the clergyman when the imposture is discovered.) As Mr. and Mrs. Fatigay return to the Congo, the groom tells shipboard interviewers: "My message to your readers is simply this. It is true my wife is not a woman. She is an angel . . . Behind every great man there may be a woman, and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of-there is a chimp...
Collier's verbal monkeyshines are so adroit as to make the reader forget the paradox that while man may be like a monkey, a monkey is not like a man. It is all prime fun among the primates, and calls to mind the verse of a British poet in which an ape reflects on the Darwinian version of the Fall...
...paradox of this dual policy is the thread which binds the separate sections of Mr. Graubard's addition to the excellent series of Harvard Historical Monographs. Labour saw no inconsistency here. The British Communist Party regarded Labour as its arch-enemy, even after the "united-front" directives of the third congress of the Comintern and no tactics were too underhanded for the communists in their efforts to woo the working class. Further, the smear techniques of the Conservative and coalitionist opposition drove Labour to even greater lengths to keep from being linked with communism in the public mind. In every...
...Barnyard. The Soviet embassy was a true enclave-an island of cruel and clownish Soviet life. The best part of the Petrovs' book describes in detail the life of the higher Soviet bureaucracy: by a paradox, the egalitarian theory of Communism has produced a pathologically heightened sense of status-so that life in the embassy went on by rules something like the pecking hierarchy observed by barnyard fowl. Mrs. Petrov got into hot water for having put a comic picture within eyeshot of Stalin's portrait, and even hotter water when she was falsely accused of having thrown...