Word: rejection
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maddox and Allen write that Stuart "animated the gravest fear of white America; a crazed, degenerate Black man kills an innocent, pregnant lawyer and child, destroys a family which symbolizes middle-class prosperity." I would first reject the notion of a homogenous "white America." The social, economic and ethnic diversity of the 200 million or so whites in America is too great to justify such terminology. I doubt that Donald Trump, Johnny Carson and a Kansas farmer wake up every morning with much in common on their minds. Second, even if one were to assume that all of "white America...
...third suggestion, the Overpowering Assumption, I think, is best. But not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it might be accepted. It is rarely "accepted"; we aren't here to accept or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
...Lansky founded the center because he feared what would happen as the last generation of native Yiddish speakers began to die -- not ultra-Orthodox Jews who still speak Yiddish but the heirs to the essentially secular Yiddish culture of Europe and North America, which the ultra-Orthodox reject. The libraries of these aged people, he worried, would be thrown out, and a world would be lost...
...Nerds say that anti-intellectuals like Olson are stunting the improvement of American education. The prevalence of Olson's attitudes in schoolyards across the country, they say, is a considerable social barrier. It's so much easier for a 10-year-old to reject nerdy virtues than to suffer humiliation...