surcease (ˌ)sər-ˈsēs , ˈsər-ˌsēs noun
: a stopping
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The word surcease has appeared in two articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on July 2 in The Stone column “Stanley Cavell and the American Contradiction” by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary and Sandra Laugier:
… The antidote to the toxin is to create the social conditions that will allow each citizen to promote and persevere in the Socratic task — so consistently highlighted in Cavell’s prose — of continuously getting to know ourselves, of acknowledging our own routes of feeling and senses of what matters and — crucially — testing these sensibilities publicly against the sensibilities of our fellow citizens.
The challenges of this enterprise go beyond merely finding the rhetorical and material resources to brush deception aside. To be a participant in a good-enough democratic polis is a perpetual project that requires taking seriously one’s abiding and evolving tastes and interests and working without surcease to create an ever-expanding social and linguistic space for every individual who arrives on our shores, or at our borders, to pursue happiness.
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