Word: spiriting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Steve Ballmer, big and balding, is bouncing around a Microsoft conference room with the spirit of the Harvard football-team manager he once was. "Bill lived down the hall from me at Harvard sophomore year," he says. "He'd play poker until 6 in the morning, then I'd run into him at breakfast and discuss applied mathematics." They took graduate-level math and economics courses together, but Gates had an odd approach toward his classes: he would skip the lectures of those he was taking and audit the lectures of those he wasn't, then spend the period before...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example, "Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If these be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume really...
...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us begin with the question, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived...
Since coming to Harvard, I have discovered that home-team spirit has taken on a whole new meaning. It used to be that I shared my obsession with the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots with my classmates and friends. Here in college, however, fellow Bay-staters are harder to find, and what used to be a game between the Patriots and some other team has now become personal war with the Californian downstairs. Admittedly, Boston teams have not done that well lately. Three months ago, I had to sit by and watch in aggrieved silence while the New York...
...problem with my newly proactive home-team spirit is that I have less time now at Harvard to watch football than I did in high school. Sunday afternoons were usually devoted to popcorn and the Patriots. Now, they're earmarked, more often than not, for sleep or the contemplation (but never completion) of my homework assignments. I have learned to bookmark the ESPN SportsZone Web Page and "reload" every 20 minutes during the game to find out the latest score. Dinner-table boasting or teeth-gnashing has replaced reading the Globe's sports section from cover to cover. Harvard makes...