Word: avidity
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...outdoor press conference, Viet Nam was the major topic, and the recent progress of the war clearly had helped the President's mood. Still, as the nation's most avid psephologist,* Johnson took every opportunity to discount his recent drop in the polls. Without even looking down at his notes, he rattled off nearly a dozen favorable tallies and, with a brief flash of his White House petulance, threw a barb at reporters: "We have had a dozen polls, I guess, in the last week. You don't read about the favorable ones, though, I observe." Quoting...
...12th century, but its heyday came in the late 17th and early 18th century, when Bach, Purcell, Telemann, Vivaldi and Handel wrote a wealth of music for it. Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and Pepys celebrated its endearing combination of solemnity and sweetness, and King Henry VIII was an avid noodler on his collection of 77 recorders. As orchestras grew larger, however, the gentle voice of the recorder was replaced by the stronger tones of the transverse flute. Then, in the early 1920s, an English musician, Arnold Dolmetsch, began making and playing recorders, and started a revival that spread slowly to Germany...
...Middle-aged people with prurient interests--mostly men" are the most avid buyers, according to the salesman at the Mandrake Book Store...
Promoter Shapiro, once a Philadelphia lawyer noted for proving a ship unseaworthy because one of its mates had malaria, got into the teaching business because he was apparently avid for audiences bigger than juries. He now tours 14 Michigan cities with 53 programs for practicing lawyers. Delighted to be called "dean," Shapiro is wont to order lawyer-aides to pick up his children at school, or require them to don white coats and serve cocktails. He first-names Michigan Supreme Court justices, tells everyone who will listen that "educators should get off their duffs," papers the country with lawyer-luring...
...critics. As one agency executive puts it. "They laughed when we sat down at the world to play . . ." And like the famed advertising slogan about the man who surprised one and all with his new-found talent at the piano, some of the Peace Corps' most vocal critics became avid boosters...