Word: archaism
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...generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it: Our civilization is decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we shape for our own purposes...
...originally cut from a LIFE magazine ad and stuck on; in Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53, there are two smiles, one where it should be, the other arranged like a necklace of teeth around the throat. With such paintings de Kooning brought off the near impossible joining of expressionist archaism with pop-style '50s femininity...
...leftover World War II DE with popgun armament and an arthritic engine room, decked out as a DER (Destroyer Escort, Radar) and dispatched to help keep track of junks along the Viet Nam coast. Arnheiter, who became her new skipper at Christmas time 1966, was another sort of updated archaism. Machinery bored and confused him. He flunked out of West Point before squeaking into-and through-Annapolis. But he was a champion debater and his head was stuffed with nautical heroes and hero worship, as well as fine sea-fighting phrases ("Seek out, engage, destroy...
...become, if anything, more famous than either. Thirty-five years separate us from the Spanish Civil War and its slaughters, and in that time the painting has cooled somewhat: its austere range of black, gray and white, its noble struggle with monumental form and the strange, universalizing archaism (there are no bombs or guns, only a broken sword; the most modern image in the painting is an electric light, which is also the most ancient, for it becomes a pitiless Mithraic sun) belong more to the world of the Greek pediment and the Roman battle sarcophagus than to that...
...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...