Word: avidity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Raving Dervish." Hitler's closest companions found "the homeless derelict from the Viennese melting pot" a normally absurd figure. Many were repelled by "this face that looked like an advertisement for a shaving lotion; this emptiness with the avid, frightened eyes; this sometimes slinking, sometimes hopping, never naturally moving form with its narrow shoulders [and] ridiculously correct suit"; this man who exhorted them "with all the semi-education of his age," using "miserable German . . . defective logic . . . tasteless humor . . . false pathos," and subjected them to "alternate whining and brutality...
Bits & Pieces. For more than a decade it was an informal evening haunt of lecturers and avid students. They might study bits & pieces of history, psychoanalysis, drama, philosophy. They pooh-poohed examinations, degrees. It was all very earnest, and somewhat mixed up. New-Schoolers took the unacademic hash and let the credit...
...clothes and college texts have great sentimental value. Unfortunately they can not be bound in pastel-pink ribbons, and filed away as neatly as love letters. Hungry moths and avid vermin are too liable to corrupt such earthly treasures. Hence they often pad the maws of ashcans and end their usefulness in dumps. For a cherished garment or a much-thumbed book, that fate is bitter. Far better to fling both clothes and texts, with a gesture of sublime extravagance, into the eager coffers of the Brooks House Old Clothes Drive which are secreted in the janitor's office...
Said Frank Knox: "We are not avid for more territory. We do not want to take sovereignty of anything. But it would be wise to insist upon complete control and possession of a sufficient number of bases in the Pacific to insure that both our naval and air strength will be effective against any future aggression in that part of the world...
...Hurd, unable to forgive his wife her lover, took a mistress named Constance Field, whose letters are perhaps the best thing in the novel. They began with the noisome clatter, wit, self-love and tinny ribaldry of an avid young female intellectual. They moved toward maturity and then into a hell soon matched by the hell Authoress Howe constructs for her hero...