Blogs

The old apothegm reiterated by those who reject stricter gun-control laws takes on a different resonance if it’s paraphrased this way: “Guns don’t kill children — children kill children.” (Author not given, “The Death of Innocence?” Newsweek, 04/3/2000, p. 18.)

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” [Hunter] Thompson, like a lot of people in the sixties and seventies, interpreted Dylan’s famous apothegm to mean that in order to be honest you must live outside the law. (Louis Menand, “Believer,” The New Yorker 2/27/2005).

This word can also be a synonym for adage, aphorism or maxim.…

For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (“forced residence,” domestic corvee, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. (Jacob Hale, Are Lesbians Women? Hypatia, 03/1/1996, p. 94.)…

The more we know about Hitler, the more enigmatic he — or rather, his fulgurant success — becomes. Here was a man without character, or with a most uninspiring personality. He had no vices; he did not drink or smoke, and he did not really care for women. “Outside politics,” Kershaw writes, “Hitler’s life was largely a void.” (Istvan Deak, The Making of a Monster, The New Republic, 04/12/1999.)

This word, when used in the above sense, can also be a synonym for for brilliant, dazzling, gleaming,  glowing, radiant and shining.…

Players are regarded [by team owners] as overpaid louts who greedily want more than they deserve. … When a player is injured, he is suspected of malingering if he doesn’t return to action immediately — unless the bone is sticking through the meat. (Ron Mix, So Little Gain for the Pain; Striking NFL Players Deserve Much, Much More, Sports Illustrated, 10/19/1987, p. 54.)

 …

The essays range over other topics, including attempts by some German historians in the 1980s to liberate Germans from the incubus of the Holocaust by placing it within the broader context of other mass murders of the twentieth century, especially those in Stalin’s Soviet Union. (Daniel E. Rogers, Murder in Our Midst, National Forum, 01/1/1997, p. 44.)

This word, when used in the above sense, can also be a synonym for hardship, pressure and ordeal.…