Word: recoil
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...word reminds us of the rat-finks we all knew in grade school and summer camp and the very possibility that we might have to report someone who we may be friends with, someone we may have had meals with or sat next to in class makes us recoil from the notion of handling our own affairs. A typical response to the honor code proposal is: if someone cheats its his or her business; in the long run, they are the loser. But are they? The best response to this argument was provided by a fellow Crimson editor when...
Americans alternate between hospitality and paranoia about the newcomers, between a promiscuous inclusiveness and a nativist recoil. It was different, they say, when the whole continent lay before us and needed building. The job is done. How many more can we take now? How long before all those foreigners, who have not the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in their hereditary code, who have not democracy and its disciplines (debate, voting), begin to tear out the Republic's circuit boards and leave them rotting in the yard? How long before the Third World overwhelms the First World...
...been refracted rather strangely in the American mind. If time has moved on, it has also receded, in a psychological sense. Seven years ago, the war seemed much further away than it does now. During a long period in the '70s, the nation indulged in a remarkable exercise of recoil and denial and amnesia about Viet Nam. Americans did not want to hear about it, to think about...
Then too there is a question of aesthetics: the American taste may be broadening, but many people still recoil from an unattractive name. So a vocabulary of euphemisms for Cinderella trash fish surfaces. Dogfish becomes grayfish or salmon shark. For opakapaka, try Hawaiian pink snapper. Blowfish are sold as sea robin or sea squab. The huge, shapeless monkfish fetches a , higher price under its French name, lotte...
...Prince, impatient to meet his wife of twenty years, disguises himself as a new undergraduate and invades Castle Adamant to claim his bride. But his suit is unsuccessful, and his father (Douglas Freeman) ends up bombarding the castle; the maidens recoil at the thought of blood and violence, and Prince Hilarion gallantly proposes (over the hisses of the audience), "Woman has failed...