Word: backwardation
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...proposed plan to substitute five required introductory courses in the humanities and natural and social sciences for the present system of concentration and distribution is put into effect, the net result, in my opinion, will be a decisive step backward. It implies a failure on the part of our secondary schools to provide a solid and wide basis for college work or for life. This failure almost certainly exists; yet the trend in the colleges toward "orientation" courses for the Freshman and Sophomore years tends to preserve and aggravate the insufficiency of the schools rather than to remedy...
Last week Washington correspondents hammering out their forecasts could not agree on a name for the '30s as apt as the title of the Tragic Era had been for Reconstruction. But their prophecies and backward looks combined to give the raw material that would enable future historians to characterize that decade-a purgatorial period that followed a fool's paradise, a time of confusion and panic, of scrimping, self-pity, despair, of painful reform of the social system, a time when Al Capone and Richard Whitney at last went to jail and many a liberal as stubborn...
Once in a plea for greater industrial, and hence military power, Joseph Stalin said: "Old Russia was continually beaten because of backwardness. It was beaten by the Mongol khans. It was beaten by Turkish beys. It was beaten by Swedish feudal landlords. ... It was beaten because of military backwardness, cultural backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. . . . That is why we cannot be backward any more." Last week, as the news of a Russian rout in upper Finland was broadcast, it began to look as if, temporarily at least, Soviet Russian efficiency was not essentially better than that of Old Russia...
...system of forts and ramparts is called "The Permanent Fortified Positions." In physical terms, the commentary meant that these positions have now been lengthened at both ends, and also increased in depth, on the same principle as the Siegfried Position-a network of strong points capable of being extended backward indefinitely should they be cracked in front. In psychological terms, the mention of "maneuvering" and "beyond the defensive phase" seemed to mean: "Germans, not only can you neither crack nor flank us, but we are now so strong we can move out to meet you in Belgium or The Netherlands...
...pantomime of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber legs of Leon Errol, they take the elements of figure skating, distort them into crazy positions to create some of the most astonishing feats ever performed on skates. Frick's specialty: a cantilever Spread Eagle in which his body, bent backward from the knees, is almost horizontal with the ice. Frack's specialty: a rocking-chair Spread Eagle (gliding in circles in a sitting position...