Word: essays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...adequate public explanation from Kennedy about the night when Mary Jo Kopechne died, the whispers and innuendoes refused to fade away. The popular memory may be short, but it generally endures, as Kennedy is unhappily discovering, at least until curiosity about public figures has been satisfied (see TIME ESSAY...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take a typical example: "Hume brought empiricism to its logical conclusion." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age he lived in?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with, "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. It this be the spirit of the age he lived in, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea what Hume really said, or what...
Just exactly what our equivocator's answer has to do with the original question is hard to say. The equivocator writes an essay about the point but never on it. Consequently, the grader often mentally assumes the right answer is known by the equivocator and marks his answer as an extension of the point rather that as a complete irrelevance. The artful equivocation must imply the writer knows the right answer, but it must never get definite enough to eliminate any possibilities...
...amusement when man's (Americans) first sentence on the moon included the inevitable word "giant," fancies se as rediscovered Mahler, where in fact she only reestablished her own tanuous appreciation of great music. The best biography was written in 1913, two years after his death; the finest single essay was written in 1939 by the excellent English critic Donald Tovey; and all of the great Mahler conductors are either dead, such as Mengelberg, Furtwangler, and Walter, or, like Klemperer and Horenstein, extremely old. Since we live in a cultural ochlocracy, political beatitude aside, it is little wonder that this great...
...reason he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it may sometimes be accepted. It is rarely "accepted": we aren't here to accept or reject; we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations) the more interesting an essay to likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret out one or two cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in your blue book...