Word: proteans
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Rothman and Lichter call this phenomenon the "protean form of psycho-political rebellion" because the (Jewish) rebels sought out "change, flux, and fluidity... [aiming] at the continual destruction of social institutions, insofar as they interfere[d] with individual experimentation...
Enemies like Satan are the top of the line, of course, which is why one discovers them only in fiction. Real-life enemies are rarely protean; usually they assume a single form with which they are comfortable, and stick with it. There is the help-seeking enemy, for example, who plays upon the odd fact of human behavior that by requesting your aid or advice he lowers himself before you and thus disables your wrath by your own sense of shame. Then too there is the help-giving enemy, who attempts to pile so much generosity about your head that...
...Impostor," spent years a his life being successfully and utterly someone else: a Trappist monk, a doctor of psychology, a dean of philosophy at a small Pennsylvania college, a law student, a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a deputy warden at a prison in Texas. Demara took the protean itch and amateur's gusto, old American traits, to new frontiers of pathology and fraud...
DIED. Mario Praz, 85, protean scholar who ranged expertly through English literature, philology, art and antiquarianism; in Rome. Praz, who taught for 32 years at the University of Rome, wrote the highly acclaimed The Romantic Agony, a study of sadism in literature...
...never do know who they are. They hint at the underside of the self-made man and self-reliance, the freedom to become whatever others will believe. As they prey on others, they illustrate not what energy and diligence but what spunk and audacity wiE do in a protean society. The jack of all trades becomes the shape-shifting diddler, a reminder of how many occupations can be made to turn on the evasion of work. The cultural promise that one can make a self by shrewdness and diligence has, then, in the world of Huckleberry Finn, soured into...