Blogs

My generation has lots of excuses for our execrable parenting. [For example] the economy has forced most women into the workplace. (Katherine Dowling, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Parents Can’t Duck Blame for Morally Abandoned Kids, 03/11/96, p. 3.)…

What my Christian experience teaches me [is that] forgiveness does ideally come first and can, with … longanimity, yield a rich harvest of justice and peace in the way it facilitates the righting of wrongs and the reconciliation of the estranged. (Michael Hurley, A Sober Truth Must Be Faced About Lack of Forgiveness, The Irish Times, 10/24/1995, p. 12.)…

The Lindberghs rose early on December 31, 1935, in Liverpool’s harbor [having fled to England to escape from the pressures of living in America and because of threats on their lives]. It suddenly seemed as though this hegira might be for naught, as a frenzied gauntlet of photographers gathered at the gangplank. (Scott Berg, Lindbergh, Putnam [1998], p. 346.)…

Clamping a bear hug on the appliance, the 6-ft. 3-in, 286-lb. Russian hoisted it off the floor. “It was a huge fridge,” he recalls, “and I carried it to my apartment up eight flights of stairs.” … This Bunyanesque figure is a husband and the father of three children, including a daughter who was born this year. (John Greenwald, The Summer Olympics/The Ones To Beat: Alexander Kareli, Time, 09/11/2000, p. 80.)

This word can also be synonymous with huge, large, gigantic, etc.…

Amid all the hubbub surrounding the defections of [two African-American studies professors] from Harvard to Princeton recently, it went unmentioned that only thirty years ago, African-American studies as we know it today didn’t even exist. Although the Kulturkampf of the 1960s touched many academic disciplines, it was the creation of black studies programs that led to the most rancorous debates on American campuses. (John McMillan, Black Unlike Me [White Boy: A Memoir by Mark D. Naison], The Nation, 07/15/2002.)…