Word: trait
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stovepiped" straight to the Chief Executive and his top aides, bypassing lower-level experts who would normally sort it out. Some Bush aides now admit privately that this practice confused the U.S. response to the Panamanian coup. The compartmentalization of information, says one senior Administration official, is "a destructive trait in any President. The information the President has is not shared with enough people to allow him to head off bad ideas...
...there are a lot of "artsy" types in Adams House. Is that necessarily bad? In some ideal sense, it isn't fair to categorize people according to a single trait. There is no doubt that every Harvard student has unique qualities that defy pigeon-holing...
...same is true of any group. No one at Harvard thinks that all Black students fit a particular stereotype. Yet we would never tolerate a residential system that strongly segregated Blacks. Is it fair to classify Black students according to a single trait in this case...
Feigned compliance is the term used by Lucian Pye, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to describe such self-protective make-believe and the obedience it spawns. As a trait central to the Chinese character, feigned compliance has distinct Confucian roots, and Confucius is very much in vogue in China today. Not for that part of his philosophy that extols good-heartedness and broad-mindedness, but for his celebration of authority, hierarchy and anti-individualism. For the purposes of China's leaders, what counts is that Confucius presumed the ruler's right to rule...
...used to explain why, despite the danger and chaos that snakes through us, we have some sense of a national character. We are loosely held, we fly off, reattach, reemerge, continue. This is what we are--which sounds like a strange kind of unity, but this behavior, this trait, whatever you want to call it, is what has always bound us together as Americans; has been ever since Huck Finn lit out for a new territory...