Word: sway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even the septuagenarian Igor Stravinsky converted to twelve-tone composition under the sway of ''St. Anton.'' Among lesser composers, instant Webernism-compressed structures, jagged melodic leaps, spare, pointillist orchestration-became a sort of standard, freeze-dried product in the 1950s and '60s. Now that the vogue has subsided somewhat, Webern is in danger of having come and gone as an avant-garde influence without ever being absorbed into the standard repertory. A more definitive assessment is needed...
Norman Podhoretz calls it, with pardonable license, the "terror." No guillotine was set up in Greenwich Village, literary heads did not roll, but there were plenty of verbal executions in the late 1960s and early '70s when radical thought held sway in New York City and many other parts of the country as well. As the editor of Commentary and a leader of centrist opinion, Podhoretz was a prime target of the Manhattan Jacobins. In a book recapturing the impassioned polemics of the era in sometimes powerful and sometimes sluggish prose, he tells how he survived the literary pummeling...
Indeed, the googol might be a good symbol for a time when the world is under the sway of technology, when it has no choice, as Jacques Ellul says in The Technological Society, but to "don mathematical vestments." The googol is the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros (see above). It was made famous, or infamous, in the 1930s by Mathematician Edward Kasner. He also offered the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros - so many zeros, said Kasner, that no matter how tiny they could not all be written on a piece of paper as wide...
...before the U.S. invaded the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia-he proposed that Cambodia's neutrality be guaranteed and that an international conference on the subject be convened. North Viet Nam's representative, Le Duc Tho, bluntly spurned the proposal, claiming that Hanoi expected to hold sway over all of Indochina some...
...glowering, lumbering bully, redolent of bar barism, scornful of the refined, essentially defensive concepts that held sway in the West--the SS-9 came to symbolize Russian brutishness...