Word: traites
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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...
...James Joyce's The Dead and Frank O'Connor's The Majesty of the Law. The familiar mixes easily with material less so: William Carleton's eerie The Death of a Devotee, Bernard Mac Laverty's grim Life Drawing. All this diversity is held together by a common trait, an irresistible claim on attention, the written equivalent of a tug at the lapel or a hand on the shoulder. This book can be picked up and put down many times, but hardly ever in the middle of a story...
...ruling hailed by civil rights and women's advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Price Waterhouse had based its decision in part on unlawful sexual stereotyping. Wrote Justice William Brennan in the lead opinion: "An employer who objects to aggressiveness in women but whose positions require this trait places women in an intolerable and impermissible Catch-22: out of a job if they behave aggressively and out of a job if they...
...tame by current standards: a man who feared his blood was tainted asked his best friend to sire his children. But the real problem is that the central character, who is a writer and who presumably stands in for the author, is almost devoid of particularity: his only trait is drunkenness. On the plus side were pungent dialogue, believable family conflict and forgiveness, and deft performances by Anne Pitoniak as a mouthy matriarch and Bob Burrus as her sly brother-in-law. The other play of promise, Charlene Redick's slight but touching Autumn Elegy, depicts a man long withdrawn...