Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Year's Eve along with last week's third space traveler, a scientist on a short-term mission. By then Commander Yuri Romanenko will have spent 328 consecutive days in space, shattering the Soviet record of 237 days and leaving the U.S. record of 84 days in the cosmic dust...
...Mirror and shrouding the record in a spooky, spiritual darkness. The piece is powerful, all right, but not perhaps in the way Jackson intended. It overpowers the joy of the playful competitiveness in his duet with peerless Stevie Wonder (Just Good Friends). It leavens the cosmic sentimentality of Another Part of Me well enough -- if E.T. had come to earth as a crooner, this would have been his My Way -- but does so with bile and fear...
...Samuel Ramey was a swaggering antihero, cocky till the end, and Soprano Julia Varady brought a sweet pathos to the obsessive Donna Elvira. Director Michael Hampe's staging was conventional until the climax. When the Commendatore dragged the unrepentant Don to perdition, the Iberian setting vanished to reveal a cosmic firmament, quenching the earthly fires of lust in a metaphysical supernova of destruction. The normally bubbly postlude took place on a desolate, Pirandellian stage, on which six characters wandered in search of a composer. That composer, of course, was Mozart, and in Salzburg he is never very far away...
...third suggestion, the Overpowering Assumption, I think is the best: but not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic it may sometimes be accepted. It is rarely "accepted"; we aren't here to accept or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions--that is by the use of the overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it is pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact it isn't obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted assumption...