Word: topically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is off-topic debate. Conventional scholastic debating in the U S. has been on-topic, an achingly serious match that is less an extracurricular pastime than a kind of secular self-mortification. On-topic debaters all over the country argue a single consequential issue for a year. Off-topic debaters, who suddenly outnumber the on-topic traditionalists on most Northeast campuses, flit from one ephemeral subject to another every hour or so, allowing themselves only ten minutes to muster each case. Success at on-topic demands fetishistic research, note cards by the hundred gross and the rhetorical felicity...
...term off-topic may have been coined by a condescending purist, but now the apostate sect, like up-and-coming Fauvists, revels in the name. Bill Smith, a natty, placid Harvard freshman and Kidd's teammate, suggests a continuing enmity between the offs and the ons. "Off-topic debaters," he explains, "tend to despise on-topic, because most of us were on-topic in high school. I was, for a year and a half. It's very, very intense." Burned out at 18, they seek refuge in the unruly rumble of off-topic. "Sometimes," says Sanford Cohen...
...Princeton debate panel president decided against wearing "either a toga or a tux to the finals." This last round is in grave Nassau Hall, where, the hosts claim, Princeton Students James Madison and Aaron Burr held forth, off-topic, 211 years ago. The Princetonians want the debaters to heed the chamber's cavernous propriety. "To waste this room on worn-out double-entendres would be sacrilege," says Bob West, '81, back for the tournament. Indeed, the puncturing blasphemies are scarce during the final round. (Only one wispy student, speaking from the floor and pointing to the room...
...never to have another serious talk with Chou. A year later I visited him in what was called a hospital but looked like a guesthouse. We chatted casually; Chou looked unchanged to my amateur eye. But whenever I raised a serious topic, Chou changed the subject. His doctors, he said, had prohibited him from discussing such problems. Why political problems impaired his health more than small talk was never explained. It was a painful session-probably for both of us. Whatever the cause of Chou's decline, his name was never mentioned by any of my Chinese interlocutors after...
...COUNTRY BETWEEN US by Carolyn Forché; Harper & Row; 59 pages; $11.50 (hardback), $5.95 (paper). After winning the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1976, Carolyn Forche paid extended visits to El Salvador, working as a journalist and human rights advocate. She could not have known that land would be Topic A in the U.S. just at the time her second book appeared; thanks to that coincidence, though, some of the poems in The Country Between Us have the urgency of news bulletins...