Word: tact
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...opinion. Rampant democrats may cry out that this is unfair, but they should remember that the societies differ widely in their scope, and that any student whose mind and whose manners fit him for admission to any one of them can obtain it by the exercise of a little tact. If in his Senior year he has failed to do so, he must blame himself for his position...
...shows his teeth like a hunted rat, now in one corner, now in another; at last he exposes his neck at Canossa to the spring of the cat that for twenty years has patiently waited in the Vatican. But endow him with an instinct amounting to foreknowledge, with a tact in the management of men that turns them into passive instruments in his hands, and renders him long invulnerable to counterplots and adverse chance, and he becomes, in fact, the Fate of his age. His history is no longer one of the several greatest dramas of all history...
...ranking nearly alike two men, of whom one has a real knowledge of his subject, and the other only what his syllabus has hinted to him. Sir James Stephen has pointed out that in history it is quite possible for an adroit and dexterous man who has coolness, tact, and experience in examinations to assume the deceptive semblance of great erudition. It often happens that one who from much reading is acquainted with the minutiae as well as the outlines of history gets no higher mark (or perhaps not so high) than another who has confined himself to a syllabus...