Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
In his second inaugural address in 2013, Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence – "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" – before asserting: "Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time".
Then, his lips moving mesmerically on the jumbo TV screens that lined Washington's National Mall, he went on: "Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
Last year, Hillary Clinton announced a new initiative, Too Small to Fail, that emphasizes the importance of talking to infants and young children; in the fall, President Barack Obama convened a White House conference whose goal was to "bridge the word gap and put more young people on the path to success".
More than six decades later those words became the bridge in "My Battle," an unpublished Guthrie lyric set to music by the folk-rock singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke and recorded on her 2008 album, "The Works".
Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world. .
The High Bridge (two words) will not be lost much longer.
New York City I was delighted by Joan Acocella's review of the book "Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language" ("Return to Babel," October 31st).
They called these words the "syntactic glue" of language: "words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning", and thus "provide a useful stylistic fingerprint" for authorship.
According to Esther Schor, in her new book, "Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language" (Metropolitan), this famous story, of the Tower of Babel, represents a sort of second original sin.
