Word: archaism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...overstate the treacherous confusion that Richelieu's Europe presented to any would-be diplomat. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) turned much of the Continent into a wasteland. Alliances flickered on and off like fireflies. Richelieu did his work, too, in a time of witch burning and archaism. His very closest adviser and friend, a shrewd Capuchin named Père Joseph (for whose shadowy role the title Eminence grise seems to have been invented) was entirely obsessed, for example, with a yearning to renew the crusades against the infidel...
...revenue by making their real estate assessments, now generally unrealistic, conform to true values. The 17 states that still have no income tax have an obvious source of added funds. In 15 states, changes could be made in constitutions that prohibit local communities from investing their idle cash, an archaism that costs them as much as $100 million a year in lost interest. And, of course, there are less conventional sources of cash: New Hampshire pans more than $2,500,000 a year from its sweepstakes...
...produce its very immediate awe, the opera's medievalism is a facile expedient for proclaiming the profundity of the drama; by the last scene the sections in more obvious liturgical setting have become annoyingly irrelevant. The two writers are not, of course, alone in this abuse. The same pretentious archaism afflicts, for instance, the Verses from the Book of Ruth of Claudio Spies which the Choral Society sang last spring and Le Mystere de la Nativite of Frank Martin which appeared here this Christmas...
...equal stress on each syllable, it was almost laughable. Yet despite the natural problems of pitch, the chorus and soloists did master the music, no mean feat. A performance keyed to the drama of the story could enliven the work, but its little-varied tension is really a pretentious archaism relying more on a cliched aura of biblical language than on the content of the words themselves...
These business losses, more than any questions of morality or archaism, seem to be behind the current furor over Blue Laws. The trouble actually started last June, when the Supreme Court declared the laws constitutional. The 1960 Legislature added to the problem by putting holidays under statutes which previously restricted only Sunday trade. Gov. Volpe sought clarification by appointing a 20-man commission, which studied the question for five months, and this week submitted its report...