Word: stratagem
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...Opera Guild's stratagem involves the substitution of spoken dialogue for many of the recitatives, and the employment of an English translation that wavers between brassy colloquialism and comically stiff couplets. Along with the idiocies of the plot itself, they provided an enjoyable parody of the heroic style. It was difficult to tell at first whether the action was farcial by intent or accident ("Where did I get the nerve?" muses the soprano after telling off Xerxes), but as the melodramatic cliches become less widely spaced the audience turned partisan, hissing the villain with all its might. As is proper...
...overlooks the basic source of tension in the world. World Communism, and world Communism alone threatens us today with world war. Germany can be no more than a pretext for war. If war comes this year-God forbid-over the Berlin crisis, it will come as a deliberate, calculated stratagem of Red aggression. Berlin is just another phase of their long-term plan to subjugate the free world. The Berlin question is just a pawn in their hands, and will certainly not determine, of itself, whether there shall be peace...
...gradually, in the areas where the schools were closed, and among the thoughtful people in the South generally, the full implications of the school closing began to soak in. Seen close up, the school closings turned out to be more than a defiance of integration, more than a legal stratagem. They turned out, in action, to be the Governor of a state seizing autocratic, political control of highly prized, independent local school systems. They turned out to be a real and forbidding threat to the competent education of youngsters in a sharply competitive national society. In short, they turned...
...farm bill. For the second time in two years, said Ike, Congress had sent him farm legislation "which I cannot in good conscience approve." Intended to freeze 1958 price supports at not less than 1957 levels, the vetoed bill, like the one in 1956. was an election-year stratagem by which 1) Democrats hoped to embarrass the Administration, and 2) farm-belt Republicans hoped to horsefeather their re-election chances...
...request to a San Francisco hospital for data on his treatment there. He must have made a shrewd guess, for the answer did not arrive in time to help the harassed Iowa City doctors. Suspicious of his continual coughing or spitting of blood, the physicians tried every stratagem they could think of to catch him in deliberate self-injury. They never could. Four times Lamphere angrily signed himself out of the hospital, complaining of inadequate care, stormed to the main door-and there was persuaded to return because he was again spitting blood...