Word: skeptics
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...taking money from the onetime Kaiser, spying for the Soviets. In 1928 Mencken published a collection of these attacks (Menckeniana, a Schimpflexicon). Born in Baltimore of German grandparentage. Mencken began to write "seriously" at 12, took T. H. Huxley (see below I for his god at 16. An amiable skeptic, short, fat. boyish to look at, he is fond of practical jokes. Some suspect his philological delvings are merely a form of involved japery. but fellow-philologists take him seriously, call him the authority on U. S. English...
...shade of a murdered Indian returns to lift tables, answer questions by raps. Ben Sexton, a mean skeptic, tries to hold the spirit down by wrestling the table. He gets laid out good & proper...
With a gush of enthusiasm which will intensify the faith of the believer, but probably repel the skeptic, Author Strong surveys Soviet achievement, finds it all praiseworthy. Embarrassing inquiries she tackles with slippery candor. The Soviet Union sells oil to warring Italy because ''idealist gestures are dangerous." Political prisoners are not sentenced merely for expressing anti-Soviet views: "all were charged with definite action against the government." Convicts live and work in "labor camps" under such admirable conditions that some refuse to leave when their terms are up. Stalin has no dictatorial powers; he is just an exceptionally...
...assumption that the proper study of the poet is the inner man, and in his poems he soliloquizes with sad coherence on the tangled emotional morals of a static mankind. Poets Auden and Spender are fiercely, often incoherently impatient of all that. Poet Robinson is a calm skeptic; they, passionate disbelievers. More satirical, less serious a poet than Spender, Auden half-fills his book with prose patches: a mock oration, an airman's journal, geometrical figures, a parody litany. Most observable emotion in Auden is scorn: of those round-table experts "lecturing on navigation while the ship is going...
...obvious remedy for the ailment is such an enlargement of the faculty as will give its members proper leisure for research and at the same time secure proper teaching under the preceptorial system. "But," says the skeptic, "where is the money coming from?" And to that question we have no answer--save that it has generally proved true that if the administration of a university shows the requisite vision and resourcefulness, the money generally comes from somewhere. Just ask A. Lawrence Lowell. The Daily Princetonian...