Word: professing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Venezuela goes into its fifth year under Pérez Jiménez, many of the other passengers on the oil-powered dreamboat profess to admire the skipper's hard-fisted style of command. "Don't rock the boat," say prosperous U.S. businessmen, happily noting the political quiet, record oil production, boom-time construction and the rising standard of living (70% up in the last decade). But the advice is given so often as to reflect at least a subconscious awareness that the boat may be somewhat unseaworthy. Sample weaknesses...
...Kremlin's weakness is not that of individuals but of the system that the individuals profess. The nature of this particular power struggle is for each leader to destroy another by blaming him for the faults that are inherent in the system...
...contributed a massive share. But to the Scots, the government in London is still "the English government" and the Englishman a foreigner. Their finances and their fate are inextricably bound up with England, but, if only as a point of pub honor, Scots hate to admit it. They profess grave doubt that their 1707 union with England is a good thing. They bristle at small slights. It rankles that some English ministries call their Scotland representatives "Regional Controllers," that the Festival of Britain brochures chopped off Scotland at the Tweed, that the English refuse to admit that Queen Elizabeth...
...said the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (30 denominations, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, with more than 35 million members). The council's third general assembly, which convened in Boston last week, was the first such gathering in a long while that did not profess to see "hysteria" rampant but found some satisfactory progress "within the framework of tested constitutional procedures." The council hailed evidence of "a spiritual seeking and hunger" in the U.S., but also sounded the churchmen's new blue note: we're-failing-because-we're-too-successful...
...Unnecessary Adjective: "If we make a habit of saying 'the true facts are these,' we shall come under suspicion when we profess to tell merely 'the facts.' If a crisis is always acute and an emergency always grave, what is left for those words to do by themselves?" ¶ The Superfluous Adverb: e.g., definitely harmful, irresistibly reminded, or literally (as in the news report that Mr. Gladstone "sat literally glued to the Treasury Bench," to which Punch once added: " 'That's torn it,' said the Grand Old Man, as he literally wrenched himself...