Word: undercutting
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...attempt "to undercut some of the anxiety over the exam," Lee said that "at least one of the questions on the test will be given in advance." He added that the paper and the exam would be weighted about equally in the students' final grades...
President Kennedy's speech ordering a resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing unless the present Geneva negotiations produce a test-ban treaty was delivered in a tone of artificial hopefulness and candor. He raised conditions that seem to undercut the possibilities of a workable agreement by insisting on an enforceable...
...tossed wildly, as if the book were the mixing bowl in which Miller, the mad chef, were preparing a salad -- to fling in the face of the diners. But not even in obscenity or nihilistic frenzy do we find a bit of solid ground. Obsence protests are continually undercut by a laugh, despair by a ray of happy contentedness; even the ferocious prophecies of the impending consummation of decay give off a strange feeling of hopeful...
...their environment than others-"survival of the fittest." Geneticists later concluded that inheritance was locked in a set of genes that usually bred true, but once in a while spontaneously "mutated" to produce a new characteristic that thereafter bred true and thus produced evolution's changes. This knowledge undercut the Lamarckian concept-named for Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829)-that characteristics could be acquired in response to environment and become hereditary.* The cause of mutations remained a mystery...
...these methods to bolster ourselves, sometimes," said Alfred, but the section loses its value if this pretending to knowledge is not undercut. "The section man can joke his students out of their pretensions," he suggested. Most important, he himself must never pretend to wisdom he does not have...