Word: solemn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...machinery of such solemn decisions grinds slow and small. Some 200 years ago, a monk wrote to Pope Clement XIII begging him to define the bodily Assumption of Mary as "a most certain dogma of faith." Clement passed the matter on to the Holy Office. In 1863, Spain's Queen Elizabeth made the same request. Pius IX, though recognizing the Queen's good intentions, was somewhat annoyed at a temporal sovereign's interference in sacred matters. He replied: "I am not worthy to publish such a dogma. The wishes of Your Majesty, the holy wishes of Your...
...prime President Roosevelt for the visit, Sumner Welles sent him a long solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked: "As a Nicaraguan might say, he's a sonofabitch but he's ours...
Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...
...University of New Zealand, confessed to a vague feeling of disappointment: "Not a single joke! I rather prefer the way we do it in our British universities-more zest." Last week's inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of 194-year-old Columbia University was as solemn as a funeral, as impressive as a coronation, and as carefully mapped as an invasion...
Psychiatry is not yet 60 years old; it is the youngest and most controversial branch of medicine. But psychiatry's solemn clinical lingo (see box) has been snatched up, misused and overused by the man in the street. Parents and teachers speak knowingly of "inferiority complexes." The comic strips and the movies refer familiarly to "frustrations" and "repressions." Psychiatry has been hotly debated and bitterly denounced by clerics (it seems to poach on their preserves), by Communists (it puts too much emphasis on the individual), by materialists (it claims that illness need not have a physical basis)-and even...