Word: warping
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From the perspective of the '70s, it is all too easy to dismiss America's past isolationism as inevitably misguided and foolish. As Selig Adler points out in The Isolationist Impulse, the doctrine in many ways is "woven into the warp and woof of the American epic." From the very beginnings of the U.S., immigrants envisioned it as a way to a new existence. "They reasoned," Adler wrote of the colonists, "that God Himself had intended to divide the globe into separate spheres. America was the 'New Zion,' and Providence had severed this 'American Israel...
...this century have priorities in the immediate moment, and beyond the eighteenth century the understanding are truly historical-the chosen preservations that have influenced us in our reference to them. The 1800's, however, are historical enough for us to believe that they are real and not a warp of the present vortex, but they are also close enough in time for us to feel some comfort with them. The energies they generated are still around, still possible resolution to fine focus. The war for independence (Revolutionary) began a certain growth of sensibilities as, our backs turned safely to England...
...Paris fashion may well be a profound anthropological achievement of the age; but before we knuckle under his authority, we might consider the findings of Madge Garland in her witty and erudite book, The Changing Form of Fashion. There, it seems, Mrs. Garland has produced a canvas whose warp is the skillful weaving together of art, literature, history and anthropology, and whose weft is the adroit contrast in the change-not of a recurring cycle, however irregular-between past and present in fashion...
Fortunately there are men and women who are too busy studying the brain to bother with sorting out such semantic eels. The big conceptual problem has been to come up with a model, or analogue, that will explain the dynamics of learning and memory. Although there are minds that warp and others that gather wool, Lord Sherrington's definition of the brain as an "enchanted loom" is more poetic than precise. The electronic computer at first seems promising. Unhappily, though the brain generates and can be prodded by electrical impulses, the most sophisticated cybernetic device is still a primitive...
...Czar of Russia, and today she is waitress in Child's Restaurant. Columbus Circle." Unadulterated camp is screamingly funny just because it is so guileless. Humor is closely bound to context, and an amusing line in 1936 becomes a hilarious one in 1970, precisely because the time warp can kleig-light meanings only implicit in the original...