Word: schoolboys
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...bald, myopic, barrel-chested, spindly-legged Pnin wrestles mirthfully with his fate even though he loses most of the falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture vultures and modern...
...clergymen saw the hand of God in the collapse of the bridge-because the train had traveled on a Sunday. But most people simply blamed the designer, Sir Thomas Bouch (already knighted for his achievement), who in his plans had made no allowance for the wind. Bouch, with his schoolboy mathematics, cut a grim and pitiable figure at the inevitable court of inquiry. His design for the girders, it seems, had just come to him in conversation. Holes in the castings had been plugged with "Beaumont Egg," a sort of crude metal paste. For once the public had found...
...Spree Waters. In Farmington, N.Mex., Paul Schoolboy Nez, a 65-year-old Navajo, was fined $20 after a state trooper testified that Nez was "drunk on horseback after dark, no lamps displayed; was thrown from horse to center of traffic lane where he went to sleep...
...pointed out that experiences during the war with students of below average age who came to College brought no observable ill effects, but he emphasized his doubt of a change in one of the "basic assumptions about American education" that the "best place for a schoolboy or girl is school...
Even the mediocre and the downright bad is worth reading, if it can be used with the faculties awake. Ethan Fromm has smashed, dulled, and lulled hundreds of thousands of schoolboy sensibilities for forty years. But for Trilling the book in all its badness, still has something to say about life, for it is the very badness, the lack of sensibility, what he calls "the morality of inertia" which characterizes not only that period, but the majority of people in every period...