Word: swiftness
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Like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Poe's article is obviously intended more for shock effect than literal advocacy. But it does address a question that increasingly concerns physicians: How to deal with the hopeless case? Realistically, replies Poe, "Medicine should not use silly euphemisms such as rehabilitation and convalescence for its losing patients. A marantology service could be a place where a person could die in dignity without all the pother death engenders elsewhere...
...large part to the fact that in their lifetime most Americans have lived through so many sudden reversals of policy, so many deviations from previously stated principle, so many changes in institutions, that they have come to regard such turnabouts as part of modern life. While swift changes in policies and positions have been commonplace in history, they seem to have occurred in the past two or three decades with dazzling frequency. Noting this phenomenon, Nixon's old rival, President John Kennedy, said in 1963: "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events...
...decline of ideology, the rise of pragmatism, perhaps even the globe-shrinking ability of modern communications that help people view the world more realistically, all can account in part for the wide acceptance of -or at least resignation to-the age's swift reversals of governmental policy. Yet there may be a further explanation for the readiness of most Americans to applaud Nixon's outreach to the Orient. However passionate they may feel about a friend or foe at one moment, Americans as a people find it hard to carry a grudge for long. They are quick...
...sextets; the uncomplicated nature of each character is pinned down in his opening lines and does not go off in any unpredictable direction for the rest of the play. The action consists mainly in a series of tightly controlled battles of wit, each of which gathers force at swift pace, peaks, and then subsides to make way for the next demonstration of argumentative virtuosity. In Shakespeare we find ourselves in a dense forest, think with the odor of vegetable combustion and overrun with luxuriant undergrowth. Moliere places us on a manicured, perfumed lawn to follow along a box-wood maze...
...power, in the action and comedy both, is that each speech shall genuinely grapple with the one before--by rebuke, question, contradiction, or misunderstanding--all this with a view of building up in a few minutes to a pungent, funny and recognizable human situation. Every step must be swift, unforced, and in itself worth hearing. The actor has to infuse his couples with a skillful variation of tone and inflection to bring this off. When he is successful, the dialogue attains the bellylaugh level and is made all the more funny with the extra wallop of an unexpected rhyme. When...