Word: classicized
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...Pavarotti was unquestionably the most celebrated and most exciting tenor in the second half of the 20th century. Was he also the best? Here a definition of terms is in order. Some tenors ranged more widely through the repertory. Pavarotti concentrated on the classic lyric roles in such works as La Boheme, La Traviata and Madame Butterfly, and in later decades, when his voice turned darker, added more forceful roles like those in Tosca and Un Ballo in Maschera; but he rarely ventured into ruggedly dramatic territory, and almost never sang in any language but Italian...
...sitcom that by now is almost a synonym for classic got that way by doing all the things that everyone at the time knew you weren't supposed to do. You couldn't have a female star who was both attractive and funny. You couldn't have her male lead be an urban Latino whose Cuban accent was thicker than a platter of ropa vieja. You couldn't build a story line around a (gasp!) pregnancy. Lucille Ball's contributions to TV's past are so obvious--Vitameatavegamin, the Tropicana Club, the slapstick routines--that it's better to note...
...misnomer, actually, to call Lost one of TV's best shows. It's a fine show on the level of character and writing, but what makes it a classic is that it's the finest interactive game ever to appear in your living room once a week. An elaborate fractal pattern of intersecting stories concerning plane survivors on a not-quite-deserted island, a secretive international organization and a monster made of smoke--Lost only begins with the 60 minutes you see on TV. Its mysteries, clues and literary-historical allusions demand research, repeated viewing, freeze-framing and endless online...
Sexual come-ons are a classic example. "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" has been recognized as a double entendre for so long that by 1939, James Thurber could draw a cartoon of a hapless man in an apartment lobby saying to his date, "You wait here, and I'll bring the etchings down...
...Crocker is the antithesis of the ideologues who provided the intellectual rationale for the Iraq war. He is a classic example of what the neoconservatives scornfully call an Arabist. He is fluent in Arabic and Farsi and has a real affinity for the cultures of the region. He was in the Beirut embassy when it was bombed by Hizballah in 1983, and he dug through the rubble for his lost colleagues. His proudest moment was raising the flag in post-Taliban Kabul, reopening the U.S. embassy. He was a co-author of a secret 2002 State Department assessment called...