Word: sagely
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This enigmatic tree-dweller (Whose sex could not be discerned by the more sage experts on Owlology) last year chose the Yard as his own domain. He (or she) sadly diminished the ranks of local pigeonry, thus causing furious partisanship among Yardlings. The advocates of campus cleanliness were decidedly pro-Owl, while the pig-con-squirrel lovers began to sport bows and arrows. The SPCA decreed that harming the Owl would upset the entire local balance of nature; budding politicos tried to capture it for Smoker campaigns; LIFE took its picture; but the Harvard Owl finally vanished as mysteriously...
...year-old gadfly partially paralyzed and stilled his buzzing. But not entirely. Even as he was brought to a halt, his latest book was in the printer's hands. It will remind old readers and explain to many a new one why the cigar-chomping, beer-guzzling Sage of Baltimore has been the most effective irritant in U.S. writing history...
...score of other subjects. Worthier books have been published this year, but few that offer even a sizable fraction of the plain reading pleasure to be found in the chrestomathy (i.e., selection of passages-chrestos, useful; mathein, to learn). Even now, when many of the earlier heresies of the Sage of Baltimore have faded to archaic jeerings, he still has the power to annoy and sometimes to infuriate. With it he also has the talent to make a reader admire the technique of the Mencken flaying process even as his sympathy goes out to the victim...
...Pickering's sage comment cut two ways, of course. It might reduce an anti-modern-art splutterer here & there to temporary silence. It could also make those on the other side of the fence feel uncomfortably esoteric...
...thinker-a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book he stabs at a more ambitious project-"an inclusive theory of ethics, esthetics, and creative thinking...