Word: worded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Love" is of course another of those embarrassing words, perhaps a word more embarrassing even than "morality"... It has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist... We read or listen to or look at works of art in the hope of experiencing our highest, most selfless emotion, either to reach a sublime communication with the maker of the work, sharing his affirmations as common lovers do, or to find, in works of literature, characters we love as we do real people...
Gardner poses the questions well enough. Though he uses the word sparingly, he diagones the contemporary sickness of the arts as decadence. Authors strive for texture, not content; they create characters to be tinkered with, not to be understood; their books foster self-hatred. Gardner's criticism of his colleagues is the most valuable part of On Moral Fiction. He deftly shows what authors like Vonnegut and Heller lack, entertaining as they are. We may be unable to swallow in the abstract the statement that the missing quality is "love," or "morality"; but leaving aside these culturally ambiguous, exhausted words...
...clearly, with regard to students, "persuasion" is an empty word. While calm dialogue with administrators is useful, and hopefully will continue in the future, it is only naive for students to expect much to come of such exchanges so long as administrators bring to them the kind of defensive, uncommunicative attitude that characterized President Bok's address to the Quincy House seniors Monday night. Students must not accept the meek, passive role the University seems intent on having them play with regard to policy. While it is impossible to predict the shape of Harvard's anti-apartheid movement...
...only 1½% to 2%: "We've never had such pressure." Declares Kathleen Connell, director of housing for the city of Los Angeles: "It has got to the point where if there is a vacancy, owners aren't advertising. News of a vacancy is getting out by word of mouth, and by the next day there's a line of applicants...
...doting mommies and daddies with an atavistic sense of how young ladies are supposed to move. A single-minded few are driven by the demonic notion that they could, some day, be swans. Most are mistaken. Once in a great while though, the real thing comes along, and word rapidly spreads through one of the world's oldest permanent floating meritocracies. Leningrad hears it, and so do Stuttgart, Covent Garden and New York: a star is born who might, just might, be capable of being made. So recognized, this singular creature is then cosseted and punished, cradled from outside interruptions...