To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
Interpretation
The quote humorously critiques the anxiety and tension experienced by spectators during a football game.
Jacques Barzun's quote highlights the intense emotional rollercoaster that spectators endure while watching a football game, likening the experience to a state of neurotic doubt. He suggests that this emotional turbulence resembles an emergency rather than the enjoyment traditionally associated with sports, implying that the high stakes and uncertainty can drive viewers to seek escape through alcohol.
In practice
During a sports discussion, one might quote this to highlight the emotional stakes of watching sports.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you.
Now, some people do this for shock value. Shock is just another uptown word for surprise. Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone. I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything. I do like finding out where the line is drawn, deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line, and having them be happy that I did.
Now don't say you can't swear off drinking; it's easy. I've done it a thousand times.
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work - the night watchman.
It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.
A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.
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