Word: penchant
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...contact of sincere American intellectuals with the Chinese people. Even American students of China who in their own minds associate themselves with a counter-culture are likely to find that in fact they come to China as part of the expansion of American life. For example, the American penchant for asking the individual Chinese citizen how he feels about things and how he would criticize the situation, etc., may not fit into the Chinese cultural environment. Visitors to China are supposed to stay out of local politics, but how can one expect red-blooded Americans to refrain from promoting human...
Congratulations to the Master and Staff of Kirkland House for being the first to usher in a new mockery of scholarship. Kirkland House has pointed us in the right direction before its penchant for debauchery and food-fights (where else is the ethos of Animal House cultivated and glorified?), but never before has it voiced so clear a call for a return to the Cave. By offering academic credit for a course on the logic of a particular football strategy, taught by no less a scholar than the venerable Harvard quarterback himself, the House has announced to us that...
...this side of the '50s is rarely seen. There is an oft-noted penchant in movies and television to reduce anything to its lowest common denominator, to distill decades and historical figures down to a catchy phrase that will fit easily into the TV Guide or a 20-second movie promotion. Movies such as The Buddy Holly Story, Grease, American Graffiti and its television spin off "Happy Days" all invite us into a jolly stroll down memory lane. But this is a terribly selective memory. In American Graffiti the world revolves around cruisin' and high school romances, with the biggest...
...convention (Philadelphia, 1787), divided against itself at another (Montgomery, Ala., 1861), reunited at a rather intimate one (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865) and renewed quadriennially. Long before Sinclair Lewis chronicled the fictional convention high jinks of George F. Babbitt, boobus Americanus and prototypical conventioneer, other observers dis covered our penchant for gatherings. "As soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite," observed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Editorialized the Nation in 1865: "If the Englishman can initiate no public enterprise without...
Maverick Economist Alfred Kahn has a penchant for candor that is both refreshing and dangerous in Washington. When he said that there is the possibility of a "deep, deep depression" if inflation continues to soar, the President was furious. Kahn responded by purging the word depression from his vocabulary and instead using "banana." So he now says: "We're in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years...