Word: problem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After randomization swelled the ranks of a once rare breed-the Quad athlete-Harvard faced a commuter problem. But athletes say the University's recently expanded shuttle system is successfully meeting their needs as they make the early morning trek across the River...
...spoken, but it doesn't look too good on paper. Another possibility is the hybrid "s/he." However, whereas "they" seems awkward on paper, "s/he" is awfully hard to pronounce in everyday speech. A few years ago, Expos instructor Nathaniel Lewis came up with a novel solution to the pronoun problem when he and his students invented the pronoun "e" to substitute for its inadequate pronominal brethren...
...none of the proposed solutions seems adequate, and a writer who chooses to confront the problem at all (I'll pass, thanks) may find that "he" and "his" are still the best. The problem stems from the fact that language, though evolving, remains in many ways stubborn and resistant to change. Linguists divide language's parts of speech into two classes: open and closed. Words in the open class are more flexible. Open nouns can adapt quite fluidly as culture changes, so that "Negro" shifts to "colored," then "black" and "African-American." Pronouns, however, belong to the closed class...
...inherently wrong with a movie that suggests that the world is an evil and corrupt place where the men who realize this play dirty and survive while all the others are naive babies: Chinatown, The Godfather and a number of other fine movies create this kind of world. The problem with Apt Pupil, of course, is not its structure but its subject, suggesting that a former S.S. agent is knowing and mature while the Todd Bowdens of the world, striving after justice, are hopelessly naive. Toward the end of the movie, a Holocaust survivor spots Dussander, who, it turns...
...noted in his lectures, when he approached the translation of Beowulf. A motif of his political poems is the conflict between the rich vowel sounds of the Irish language and the consonant-heavy word-clumps of the Anglo-Saxon. In approaching the Beowulf translation, Heaney faced a different problem--cramming what he called the "giant ingots" of the Anglo-Saxon tongue into the "itty bitty tiny" parameters of moden English, parameters Heaney has broken through with consummate skill in much of his own poetry. His main means of combating this problem was to reject the use of the heraldic language...