Word: pile
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every idea I had was in the pile. The ones starting with "Recently I've been thinking..." and "Over the past four years...." The dissertations on the ghostly Harvard advising system. The irreverent references to General Wong's chicken and urinating on John Harvard. Even the open-letter format, which I had come up with in the shower a few days before, was taken last year...
Rudenstine was, in his own way, ambitious, aiming to redefine the nature of the job that was bestowed upon him, and along with it, the way the University functioned. And he aimed to rake in a pile of cash...
Anyone campaigning for optimism runs the risk of sounding like Ronald Reagan in his fable of the invincibly sunny child who searched for a Christmas pony in the manure pile. A person must have access to optimism--not often an available grace in areas of great poverty and disease (the African AIDS belt, for example). And it depends what the object of your optimism is. An optimist who hopes to start a flourishing small business is different from an optimist who hopes to blow himself to heaven by driving a car bomb into the Great Satan's military barracks...
...insist and insist again, by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up we decide C- (Harvard being Harvard, we do not give D's. Consider C- a failure). Why? Not because they are a sign the student does not know the material, or hasn't thought creatively, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." "The whole thing boils down to human rights." Now I ask you, I have...
Artful equivocations are even worse; lynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our lynx eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud." (V.G.); "But whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might...