Word: background
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...applicants. Almost all of the college graduates applying for admission to the legal profession have been found to be "well fitted both in character and education." Perhaps seventy-five per cent of those with only secondary school education were considered "seriously deficient in general education and general background." The motive for choice of the law by the latter was generally hope of increased salary. Few of them had any coherent notion of American or English history. One applicant was of the opinion that Magna Carta was a naval expedition...
...thing, these mice were dead. For another, they were, as mice go, famed. They had arrived in the luggage of Explorer-Engineer Grant Carveth Wells of England, who was going to take them to the American Museum of Natural History, where they would be mounted against a background of bleak tundra and labeled Lemmus norvegicus, the lemming. Stubby of tail, tawny of fur, blunt of snout, five inches long, lemmings are probably the only mice that ever excited awe in both sexes of human kind. Not Aesop's mouse who gnawed a lion free; not the three blind mice...
...husband, lover, officer, sociologist and human being -do not contribute immediate lucidity to events which the reader must follow subjectively, by the impressionist method. A crucial telephone talk may last several chapters, the words actually spoken falling pages apart while numerous causes, consequences and chunks of mental and emotional background are tracked down in hurried asides. Yet such episodes, and much apparently meaningless detail-such as a sonnet composed on a challenge in two and one-half minutes -come into focus sooner or later. The total effect is vivid, clear and all the stronger for its slow fusing...
...White, on the other hand, at 58, can only shudder, or pretend to, at the "dark and awful things" he saw in barns, woods and alleys. It is not for him to live within himself. He must paint a dismal background against which the present will seem bright. So that he can say: "Those boys of a drab and dirty day, grown mature, have performed a miracle . . . modern civilization ... a great agricultural empire ... a rich industrial commonwealth . . . out of the bottomless cornucopia of Providence," etc., etc. He accuses men his age of overmuch pride in their material achievements and sentimentality...
Today and tomorrow the Harvard Dramatic Club presents at private performances at 8 and 9 o'clock the fifth annual Miracle Play against the "Cathedral background of the Germanic Museum," as the official notice phrases it. The cathedral background is the replica of the golden gate of Firebug that stands at the end of the Romanesque Hall and serves as an almost ideal stage for a religious play of this kind...