Word: pretended
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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However, this quest for music-off-the-beaten-track lends a certain amount of zest to concert-going. Mitropoulous himself would not pretend that the Mahler First is anything but a very bad symphony. Nobody, even the most ardent Mahlerite, imagines that there is anything important or cosmic about the first movement, for example, which goes on for about fifteen-minutes with little woodland chirpings and bleatings of the clarinet, and launches into a phony folk-lore theme which, after muddling around soupily in the horns through another ten minutes, finally expires in sheer exhaustion. Nobody, I say, could honestly...
...were as stray and divided as sheep. They had dissolved their political parties and their lobbying machines. They had no aims, no organization, no hope. Their first and only act was to adjourn until January 20. Then, in a mockery of the days when they could at least pretend to steer laws, some of them banded together in a Diet Members' Club, to "direct proceedings." With this they were vastly satisfied-until they found that the man who organized the club was an agent of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, which is run by Colonel Hashimoto...
...appropriate dinner-table chitchat as they went along. Another client was ordered to put a birdcage over his head, sing Listen to the Mocking Bird. More terrifying was the experience of a gentleman who had to lie on a bed sheet in the middle of the studio stage and pretend to be a male seal wooing his mate. To add zest to his performance, a real seal was quietly placed beside him which barked happily down his neck. For thinking up such consequences, listeners are paid...
...Bureau is two-fold. It attempts, first, to help members of the community who are too poor to hire a regular attorney in those cases where they need his services; and, secondly, to give law students the training which even so large a law school as Harvard cannot pretend to furnish...
...some day their power must be laid down, can always find a reason why the fatal day mus be postponed. In their minds there is always a crisis in which their services are indispensable. Always some great work at hand which they, and they alone, can do. Outwardly, they pretend that they groan under the burden and would be glad to lay it down, but in their secret souls they cling to their places. . . . The friends and sycophants of the incumbent . . constantly assure their chief that the public good demands that he should not desert the ship. This . . . sweet music...