Word: raison
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...back pages of the daily journals, from "Whiz Bang", from the over-fertilized imaginations of the presumably witty, come combinations of words rarely before encountered. "Men Without Women", "Judd, Ruth and the Sashweight", "Browning and Three Peaches", just growed for the occasion. They could not have had a prior raison d'etre and we trust will sink into that impenetrable oblivion which we feel sure awaits them...
...university trained men are doing. And certainly it is not the dilettante, however interesting he may be, who is making possible the refinement of living, but the specialist impervious to every other interest who burrows until he unearth his treasure. His importance to society, his conception of his own raison d'etre, hang on his search. And while his undergraduate, training can not have left him bare of all general knowledge, the necessity of keeping apace or in advance of the rush of discovery grants no opportunity for attention, however desirable, to other learning. But the faculty of being perfectly...
...Shakespeare's, even with the small amount of merely suggestive scenery used in his day, could be acted behind a soundproof glass curtain, and the audience would understand it as well or even better than the wordy actionless plays of today, which rely upon witty dialogue for their raison d'etre...
...most indulgent of the remarks passed on the sidewalks of Dublin. But "Tim" did not give "two hoots" what anybody thought and everybody knew it. And even if the opposition has come to be better known and less associated with assassinations, "sure and to goodness thair's no raison at all, at all, why Tim Healy should stop bein' Tim Healy...
There is something essentially unethical in all this. It seems a truism to say that the raison d'etre of a Senator is to legislate rather than to perpetuate his lease of power and that of his party ad infinitum if possible. Yet the senatorial attitude seems to be the reverse of this. And Haines' reappointment seems to indicate that the president shares the senatorial viewpoint...