Word: possessives
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...Your writers were kind enough to call the Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded a "human warehouse [Feb. 14]." I am inclined to be more realistic and classify it under the category of slaughterhouse. For what minds these children and adults do possess or once did possess have been totally destroyed by the complete lack of attention, respect, love and training that they so desperately need...
...Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially, Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. -1984, George Orwell...
...leisurely pursuits, could do that better. Its task was the nuts and bolts construction of the new socialist order. Mayakovsky admitted as much when he write in a poem, "Shakespeare had at his disposal a total of 60,000 words. But the genius-poet of the Future shall possess in every moment 150,000,000,000." Mayakovsky had the vision of the future genius-poet but was stuck with Shakespeare's used-up diction...
Like the limerick, the pun may well be a folk-art form that defies condescension, scorn and contempt, and possess es the lust for survival of an amoeba. There will always be some, like that formidable adamant, Vladimir Nabokov, who believe that the pun is mightier than the word, that people who cannot play with words cannot properly work with them. "A man who could call a spade a spade," Oscar Wilde remarked, "should be compelled...
...trying for the past six years to get clear of the narrow context of museum art and the still narrower one of private buying. So his projects for monuments are an effort to take over the environment-"to make," as he puts it, "something so big that nobody can possess...