Word: pretender
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rationalize or justify our guilty pleasures. I’ve been invited to movie nights whose stated purpose was to view a B-movie “ironically.” Students typically use this type of defense for enjoying Keanu Reeves flicks and Xena re-runs. Alternately, some pretend that their vices are part of a larger ethical stance, including my Populist friend who assures me that his preference for sauce-slathered ribs over foie gras is purely due to his desire to be one with The People. (I’ve also heard this argument from a Social...
...that, at least more attention. Pope Benedict’s recent comments on the “dying” churches in the West haven’t even drawn scorn but only apathy; no one even bothers to respond to such critiques anymore. I won’t pretend to know exactly where a depopulation of churches unprecedented since the Black Death or the collapse of Rome will lead us, but I imagine it will be something like what I saw during those summer days in Brooklyn: a West eager to keep up its old habits but increasingly unable...
Obviously, the show is on President Allen's side. The problem is that by giving her no party, no positions, no platform, it ends up defining her--like many strong women on TV--mainly by her gender. Sure, it would be naive to pretend that her sex would never be an issue. But real women pols are defined by their beliefs, not just their chromosomes. We have no idea what Allen stands for; she just stands against the obtuseness of men. In the pilot, she threatens military force to save a Nigerian woman from being stoned for adultery; Templeton sniffs...
...great chick magnet." COLIN POWELL, former U.S. Secretary of State, referring to the BlackBerry e-mail devices that he said some of his aides appreciated because they could pretend they were getting messages from...
...amazes me how much amnesia Harvard seems to have about the role of undergraduate women in the University. For over 100 years, Radcliffe served as a women’s center within the university. Now that the two institutions have merged, there seems to be a deliberate effort to pretend that Radcliffe never existed. ’Tis a pity...