Word: trait
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...also as playful as a small boy, a trait that sometimes results in childishly prankish writing, atrocious puns and sub-college humor. Yet along with the impishness runs a strand of poignance and melancholy, a nostalgia for the paradise lost of childhood, quite possibly inspired by Nabokov's enforced early exile from his native Russia...
Well of Feeling. On political issues he is the essence of what Britons call bloody-mindedness-the trait of holding to one's own convictions, no matter how wrongheaded they may seem to others. He is the delight of right-wing Tories in money matters, demanding the abolition of government fiscal controls and proposing to cut income taxes in half and reduce government spending drastically. On foreign policy issues, he is a devout "Little Englander," who would end all of Britain's commitments beyond Europe, dissolve the Commonwealth and cut loose Rhodesia to go the route of former...
...five songs, indistinguishable from one another with the exception of The Porpoise Song which has been on the radio for 41/2 months. The director plainly aspires to TV commercials and thinks he's got a line on how to be Richard Lester. He's mistaken. The film's distinguishing trait is its unbelievable paranoia: the plotless action has The Monkees chased, separated, persecuted, imprisoned, ignored, shot at, busted, spyed upon, abandoned, attacked, starved, crated, drowned, dropped from great heights, shrunk, crushed, disbelieved, stripped, transfigured, and generally much maligned. Head earns the prize for Biggest DOWN of 1968. Your initial inclination...
...nation of Stoics. From the outset, Americans have been so compulsive about winning that losing is almost unAmerican. In this sense, the U.S. is only the most extreme example of the Western trait that Oswald Spengler described as Faustian?the refusal to believe in a static order or a fixed fate. The very freedom of Western culture puts a heavy burden on losers. Western man's destiny is largely up to him?and so are his failures. The fabulous opportunities open to a new people on a new continent became the basis of a secular religion, a faith in competition...
...pictures, it reached outside its own store and borrowed about three-quarters of the portraits now on show. Paintings, busts, daguerreotypes, cartoons, and even occasional photographs are arranged in rooms that were liberally draped with flags and bunting for opening week. Each room is meant to illustrate a national trait; together, the exhibits are intended to answer the question posed by the French-born essayist Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur near the beginning of his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer: "What then is the American, this...