Word: pretending
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tried to resolve the conflict between what he saw as the deleterious elements of secularism and the fact that Harvard was a secular university. Pusey clarified, "There can be no quarrel in a University with secularism itself, but only with it as it comes hubristically in its turn to pretend to speak for the whole of life." For Pusey, therefore, there is no absolute resolution of the dichotomy, but rather a balancing of religious and secular forces, each of which has its proper role in the University's tradition...
Modern Politics. To capture the secret, cargo cults usually contain some ritual imitation of European customs which may hold the clue to the white man's magic. Sometimes believers dress in European clothes and sit around tables with bottles of flowers on them, sometimes they pretend to write on pieces of paper. Many of the cults seek to bring on the new by destroying the old; they deliberately violate the ancient taboos of their people, kill their livestock, stop cultivating their fields. "Sometimes they spend days sitting gazing at the horizon for a glimpse of the long-awaited ship...
...three of us get together on some deal and everybody says it's a bad thing. But those businessmen do it all the time and nobody squawks"), the back of his hand for the draft board that rated him a constitutional psychopath in 1943: "Who wouldn't pretend he was nuts to stay out of the Army? I told them I steal for a living. They thought I was crazy but I wasn't. I was telling them the "truth...
...more attractive, and as a result it sometimes has a sad, almost bitter taste. The cheerful performance of Stephen Wailes as the Prince prevents any such thing from happening at Adams House, and so draws the teeth of the play and injures its continuity. The hypocrisy with which he pretends to pretend to insult Falstaff, while actually meaning every word, is completely soft-pedaled, and the play's most multi-edged ironies go with it. Affairs are considerably heartier on that account, but there is nothing self-compensating in the insipidity and lack of eloquence in Mr. Wailes' later scenes...
...profundity and a platitude. But the Stepfather's long speech, to the effect that the Characters are more real than the "real" actors, is subtle and intriguing, and so is the dramatic embodiment of this theme in a great entanglement of paradoxes: the Characters are really actors who pretend to be characters demanding to be acted, the Actors are really pretending to be other actors pretending to be characters, and so on. Confusing, yes, but Pirandello seems to prefer true confusion to false certainly--a defensible position...