Word: esprit
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...often like a cruise ship: the rules of behavior seem formidably strange at first, as do one's fellow passengers, and one feels a yearning for the familiar comforts of home. But after a while the routine becomes second nature, and certain attractions begin to reveal themselves: the esprit de corps of participating in a common adventure, a feeling of liberation from home-town pressures and personalities, the stimulus of new people with disparate backgrounds and ideas...
Many of these fragile jeux d'esprit were done when, while staying at friends' homes, he amused their offspring with stories and images. As with Lewis Carroll, so with Andersen: children released him. He saw what the social assumptions of Victorian culture veiled from most of his fellow adults: that children, far from being the apple-cheeked, docile innocents their parents thought them, were monsters of imagination, able to look at other monsters with candid relish. (The tales collected by the brothers Grimm-not to mention some of Andersen's own-are packed with sadism and nightmare...
Morale varies widely among departments and agencies and often changes with changing circumstances. NASA's glamour quickly faded when the current economy cuts began. The Bureau of the Budget has excellent esprit, mostly because it has many jobs in the higher pay grades and advancement comes quickly. The status of chiefs can be important. At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which attracts a high proportion of idealists, elan plummeted when it became obvious that the Administration was cool to the goals of many department officials...