Word: uselessness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...talk to 200 Freshmen in Smith Halls Common Room last night. "Here is a knife of keenest tempered steel. In the hands of the surgeon it is a means of saving life; in the hands of the assassin it becomes a fatal weapon. The tool itself is useless, it is the guiding intelligence behind it that counts. So it is with our lives...
...most recent out-cropping of this kind was detected and the offender caught. He had been cutting plates out of books to take home for his own use, making the copies entirely useless for other students in the course, and in most cases destroying the plates when he got through with them. As soon as the facts were known, he was dismissed from the University. There was no intention to make an example of his case. The authorities took action, and rightly, in the interests of the orderly majority as authorities down through history have always done whenever they have...
...infinite-is also a circle. This does not sound so startling, but consider the consequences of the idea, if it is correct-the past and the future may meet. What is to come may be the same as what has been. Distinction between "will be" and "has been" is useless. The future is the past, the past the future, and the present a combination of the future and the past. A. D. runs into B. C. and the order of things gets all mixed up. Time is the fourth dimension, in which the straight lines of all the other dimensions...
...lack of any sense of fair play. In fact, the stealing of books has been going on for so long that it has hardly any effect any longer --except for a slight pinch during examination periods. And so much ink has been spilled over the question that it seems useless to discuss it any further. When things reach such a stage, editorials, individual professors, and the members of the Library staff can do nothing. Even the recommendation of the Student Council that the names of all book-stealers be posted publicly has had no apparent effect...
...Useless Information", an article in the May Atlantic by R.M. Gay, is an eloquent defence of "the hospitable mind" of "well-appointed heads that carry about a quantity of odds and ends, picked up without thought or conscious intention during the journey of life". It seeks a favorable hearing for the man who lets his mind grow, rather than be cultivated, and an escape from the educational expert "who can tell you how to put a mind together as one would a salad". It is one of those rare protests against the brutal carrying out of specialization which...