Word: utilitarian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comes from its cheapening by would-be wits, e.g., the golfer who specified: "Scatter me well over the tenth green at the club. It's been my nemesis so often I want to haunt the place." The Rev. Geoffrey Hilder called ash-scattering "pagan -even if it is utilitarian." Canon Cyril Sansbury denounced "sprinkling someone's remains in his own rose garden . . . in hope that dear George who died last year would grow up into new roses next year. I call this a kind of pantheism...
Poet Viereck thinks that U.S. educators can best discharge their responsibilities to future generations by swinging away from "the short-sighted cult of utilitarian studies" and back towards the humanities with their "reverence for integrity, not because it's fashionable but because it's true." Such a reverence "would work a moral revolution deeper and more helpful than all the shallow artistic and political and economic revolts of our panting apostles of progress. It would be a moral revolution against that inner smirk which prefers cleverness to wisdom...
...housewife," he said, "will consider a table from a utilitarian angle. A carpenter will note the way it is made and the quality of the wood used. A poet-a bad poet -will find in it a symbol of the peace of the home. And so on ... For a painter, it will quite simply be a grouping of flat, colored forms. And I mean flat...