Word: barren
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...class of men whose only ability lies in tearing down, instead of our being able to appreciate an artistic piece of work as a whole, our knowledge must come from a view of it lying dismembered before us like the wreck of some noble ship cast upon a barren shore...
...some compensation; but this is so far from being the case that the instructors of English in American colleges have to spend much of their time and strength in teaching the A B C of their mother tongue to young men of 20-work disagreeable in itself, and often barren of result. Every year Harvard graduates a certain number of men-some of them high scholars-whose manuscript would disgrace a boy of 12; and yet the college cannot be blamed, for she can hardly be expected to conduct an infant school for adults...
...colleges." He takes the ground that Greek and Latin should be elective as in Harvard. He declares that no one should be completed to "waste his time" in studying those studies for which he has a positive distaste. He claims that the training derived from such studies would be barren in its results. He claims that "a general degree should attest equality of devotion and accomplishment in a curriculum of studies, adjusted with due reference to difficulty and labor." He goes further with regard to the classics in claiming that "classical proficiency may be distinguished in a degree, as excellence...
...technique was most effective. The Volkmann concerto which he played is in a very different style from the Symphony by the same composer, played at the first concert of the series, and is as interesting and full of feeling and melodic beauty as the symphony was dry and barren of ideas...
...alone; in which only one has a partial glimmering of success for lumdreds and hundreds who inevitable fail; and in which the few exceptional successes are so flagrantly useless that they can only be regarded at the best as a somewhat trivial and fantastic accomplishment an accomplishment so singularly barren of all results that it has scarcely produced a dozen original poems on which the world sets the most trifling value; while we waste years in thus perniciously fostering idle verbal imitations, and in neglecting the rich fruit of ancient learning for its bitter useless and unwholesome husk-while...