Carl Remick wrote:
> >
> to castrate the public imagination.
To bad I didn't keep my collection years ago of passages with The ________ imagination" in them. I threw my notes away when I realized that the phrase was always empty, no matter how the blank was filled in, and it was on the whole so silly that a critique of the usage wasn't worth anything. "The public imagination" is as obscure as anything in Butler -- worse, actually, because it probably triggers the delusion in each reader that (s)he understands it.
Carrol