Word: archaism
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...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...
This patched up Hellenism, but it could not revitalize it spiritually. Into the deserted streets of the spirit crept Stoicism and Epicureanism, cool in faith, cooler in comfort. Astrology was in vogue together with "archaism," an aping of the past for the sake of novelty. The death of Hellenism in the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by a "triumph of religion and barbarism," says Toynbee, taking issue with Gibbon. As Toynbee sees it, Christianity did not put the torch to the classic world; it lit one for it in the sightless dark...