Word: dictums
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...treaty, in effect, consecrates the dictum laid down by Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius in 1609 that the oceans of the world belong to everyone. The problem, says Richardson, was that "the old Grotius order was breaking down." When negotiations first began, 50 countries had extended the traditional three-mile territorial limit to twelve miles, and many had pushed it to 200 miles. Bickering over fishing rights had even flared into gun battles. Freedom of passage through strategic straits was jeopardized. The discovery of mineral nodules on the seabed raised questions never defined in international law. The draft treaty attempts...
Abroad is a graceful elegy to travel in the old sense, which involved much more than missed connections and dubious food. Fussell quotes approvingly Samuel Johnson's dictum that "the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." There was a time when people went out into the world not knowing what they would find. Instead of cameras, they carried notebooks and writing implements. They wrote about what they had never seen before for people who would probably never...
...paucity of real news in Detroit raised questions about whether conventions should be covered so exhaustively. Fewer than half the homes watching TV last week were tuned to the convention; the top audience was Wednesday, when 54% were watching. Asked about this, network executives trot out Cronkite's dictum that the quadrennial spectacle is an important "civics lesson." Arledge of ABC, however, sees an end to the full nightly coverage. "It doesn't make any sense," he said. "It just shows how we can flex our muscles by putting our cameras in front of everything that moves...
...Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko-seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this day: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our problem is to take this matter into our own hands...
...writes with quiet wit and subdued sympathy about the states of mind that have become the clichés of middle-class malaise. One need not elaborate, except to say that after 30 years of postwar fiction, American writers appear to have reversed Tolstoy's happy-family dictum. It now appears that all unhappy families are alike...