Word: commoner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fixture in the superpower relationship. For even when talks are stalled and not producing agreements, they serve as a safety valve for the pressures of intensifying competition and mutual misunderstanding; diplomats and generals are forced, by the very existence of the forum, to vent their mistrusts and probe their common interests...
...looked as if matrimony were in for another of the ideological muggings that have become as common in the past ten years as Mickey Ropney's honeymoons were in an earlier age. But wait. A regressively cuddly, softening note sounded: "Nevertheless, snuggled in bed at night, that small voice inside still says, 'I want to be married.' " And it may even be all right, wrote Genelli, to heed that little whisper. Before she had finished with the subject, in fact, she had not only granted matrimony a grudging endorsement (after all, "for some but not all couples...
...gust of primitive certitude blowing in from the right. The grudgingly delighted little rediscoveries of marriage and other products of anamnesis seem part of a new American talent for throwing open the door to the worthy and obvious, to a solid modest vista of common sense or even virtue, and treating it as a revelation that the cosmos has, until now, kept hidden. It is like discovering the wheel all over again...
...pervasive solipsism may account for the need to go around periodically rediscovering the wheel. The notion that all human history began at one's own birth, a common delusion, remains extraordinarily strong, even in an electronic and allegedly literate civilization capable of reproducing the prenatal past at the touch of a button or the cracking of a book. As the Italian writer Giovanni Papini wrote about his generation of World War I, "For the 20-year-old man, every old man is the enemy; every idea is suspect; every great man is there to be put on trial; past...
ALICE SUFFERED her first breakdown at 19, and was bedridden with multiple ailments by the time she reached her forties. Her list of infirmities resembles an-encyclopedia of nervous disorders common to nineteenth-century women: at various points in her life, her condition was called neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complications, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis. Although it never became clear how many of her problems were physical, Alice's condition was at least, in part, a matter of choice. After feeling slighted and neglected throughout a healthy childhood and adolescence, she discovered, during her first...