ellauri067.html on line 493: Book reviewers have a long history of attacking Pynchon for his flat characters. Roger and Jessica are susceptible to this criticism. Neither is given much of a history. We don’t know where they grew up or who their parents were. This is one of the great failings of... what to call it? "middlebrow" is antiquated... anyway, a very common kind of criticism (common in the Anglo-American world, anyway), and it affects how authors write (which is one reason I read mainly Russian literature these days). I don't need to know "where they grew up or who their parents were" and I don't much care, unless, of course, you write about it brilliantly because that´s truly what you want to focus on, as opposed to "welp, better provide a plausible background for my characters so the reader will believe they're behaving this way." Just write good sentences in a good and surprising order. Two people have fallen out of love? I don't care if it's because one of them has mommy issues or the other was bullied as a child—people fall out of love all the time, for any reason or none, just tell me what they do about it, and in language that makes me want to keep reading! Teoxet on tärkeät, vähät elämästä. En jaxa luontokuvauxia, hyppään ne heti yli.
ellauri096.html on line 102: Science is about what is the case rather than what ought to be case. This seems to imply that science does not tell us what we ought to believe. The traditional way to fill the normative gap is to delegate issues of justification to epistemologists. However, Quine is uncomfortable with delegating such authority to philosophers. He prefers the thesis that psychology is enough to handle the issues traditionally addressed by epistemologists (or at least the issues still worth addressing in an Age of Science). This “naturalistic epistemology” seems to imply that ‘know’ and ‘justified’ are antiquated terms – as empty as ‘phlogiston’ or ‘soul’.
ellauri107.html on line 504: Whenever Thompson twanged, “Put your John Hancock on that line,” Babbitt was as much amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college graduate, he played golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went to Chicago he took a room with a private bath. “The whole thing is,” he explained to Paul Riesling, “these old codgers lack the subtlety that you got to have to-day.”
ellauri107.html on line 518: He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol—no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:
ellauri275.html on line 453: Chavchavadze's influence over Georgian literature was immense. He moved the Georgian poetic language closer to the vernacular, combining the elements of the formal wealth and somewhat artificial antiquated "high" style inherited from the 18th-century Georgian Renaissance literature, melody of Persian lyrical poetry, particularly Hafiz and Saadi, bohemian language of the streets of Tiflis and the moods and themes of European Romanticism. The subject of his works varied from purely anacreontic in his early period to deeply philosophic in his maturity.
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