Word: subtractions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Divide each student's grade point average (GPA) by four, multiply by one-sixteenth of his total credit hours, multiply again by the number of terms he has studied at the university, raise to the .585 power, add the student's total number of credit hours divided by 96. subtract one, and multiply...
...superfluous when. The judgment is aesthetic, and tastes vary. Some Americans might regard all sermons, lectures and political speeches as superfluous. Such testiness, however, can be shrugged off as a symptom of hyperactive intelligence. The criteria for talk should be appropriateness and pertinency. The essential question is: Does it subtract from or enhance the moment into which it falls? The deeper reason that sports commentary is annoying is that it so often ruptures the flow of the main event. The effect is easier to see when one imagines it occurring in the middle of a true drama, Othello...
...rightly try not to participate in posterity's characteristic moral indifference and in its crazed and crude worship of creative power. But as members of a university our task is to find enemies as well as friends, to push back the moral vetos on intellectual coexistence, and to subtract from the obstacles that society offers to a life of thought rather than to add obstacles, of our own making...