Word: procrustean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...forcing great thinkers into modern political debates with Procrustean zeal, Justice makes mere politics of political philosophy. Kant should be an end in himself. One should not, and does not, have to locate his thinking on our political spectrum to make him interesting. But students in Justice are required to pluck Kant from the clouds, fumble with him in their untutored hands and mold him to a present-day problem--like smashing a butterfly between one's fingers in order to admire its wings. Such familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a false and dangerous sense of intimacy...
There is not enough space here to supply an adequate roadmap for a liberal education. But a good procrustean rule of thumb is to doubt everything modern, which means all philosophy, literature, art and music less than 180 years old. Jane Austen's brilliantly anti-modern and anti-Romantic novel Mansfield Park is an especially fine place to start a liberal education. But wherever one begins, one must ultimately turn to the exceedingly difficult works of Plato and Aristotle. The reason one must strenuously study these fossilized Greeks reveals itself only after the fact, so you must take my advice...
Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those...
...messianic zeal as off-putting as the detached manner of the doctor at my H.M.O. When Christoph checked my "energy centers," my mind summoned up horror stories of patients crippled by chiropractic quacks. Deficiencies in my sixth (or was it fifth?) "chakra" notwithstanding, once Christoph had finished his Procrustean pullings, crackings and pushings, the pain was gone and I felt 20 lbs. lighter...