Word: procrustean
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There is not enough space here to supply an adequate roadmap for a liberal education. But a good procrustean rule of thumb is to doubt everything modern, which means all philosophy, literature, art and music less than 180 years old. Jane Austen's brilliantly anti-modern and anti-Romantic novel Mansfield Park is an especially fine place to start a liberal education. But wherever one begins, one must ultimately turn to the exceedingly difficult works of Plato and Aristotle. The reason one must strenuously study these fossilized Greeks reveals itself only after the fact, so you must take my advice...
Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those...
...messianic zeal as off-putting as the detached manner of the doctor at my H.M.O. When Christoph checked my "energy centers," my mind summoned up horror stories of patients crippled by chiropractic quacks. Deficiencies in my sixth (or was it fifth?) "chakra" notwithstanding, once Christoph had finished his Procrustean pullings, crackings and pushings, the pain was gone and I felt 20 lbs. lighter...
...member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes...
That psychic procrustean bed is being splintered by Ferraro's campaign. The next woman to run for Vice President will not need to achieve perfect self-modulation. Nor will a male candidate again take the liberty, as George Bush did, of making lame jokes about the World Series when given the chance to ask a question of his female opponent. Lee Csanad, a typographer, said indignantly, "Bush certainly underscored the fact that to this Administration our opinion has never mattered." The Bush campaign's post-debate donning of the manly trappings of the locker room-from gleeful references...