Word: awkward
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...little weak on the acting end and Morely too conscious of how his spoken words have sounded in other actors' interpretations. Edward Morse, on the other hand, cuts loose from D'Oyly-Carte's version to create an interestingly stiff and proper Sir Joseph. Paul Sperry, while a bit awkward with the spoken word, has a cheerful and booming voice that sounds just fine. And Elizabeth Kalkhurst does Josephine with feeling and restrained vigor, if not animation...
Rainbow on the Road's fatter dividends are paid in local types (traveling songsmiths, drovers, eccentrics) and local talk ("She was plump as a little pig. active as sin, awkward as a calf, and not much more legs on her than a pigeon"). Best of all are Author Forbes's evocations of New England in the four seasons. Her book ends in the late fall: "Crows were out gleaning, looking like blown bits of charred paper. And talking all the time - like crows talk. Far above, the lonely hawk floating. Harvest is over. It is the lone-somest...
...Awkward Personalities. Their passions thus spent on television, most of the members were as docile as a BBC audience when the Prime Minister, who cares little about TV one way or the other, arose to report on the Bermuda Conference. He was in fine form as he told the House of his government's hopes for settlements in Trieste and Iran, of his plans to "redeploy" the British fighting force in the Middle East, of his many chats with President Eisenhower, about "our Russian fellow mortals-for that is what they are," about atomic energy, about EDC (see INTERNATIONAL...
...politically unruly as his heavy mane of tousled hair. Ever since he was elected Cleveland's mayor in 1941, Maverick Lausche has spurned "machine" support, winning elections despite organized Democratic opposition. He has heaped such florid oratorical praise on some G.O.P. leaders that they find it awkward later to criticize him in normal partisan fashion. In the 1950 senatorial campaign, Lausche said he "might" vote for Bob Taft instead of the Democratic candidate. By last year the governor had won such popularity as a conservative Democrat that, in defeating Charles P. Taft, the Senator's brother, he topped...
...During the last hundred years, nearly every intellectual force has worked, in all innocence, against language. The strongest, science and technology, did two damaging things: they poured quantities of awkward new words into the language and this in turn persuaded everybody that each new thing must have a name, preferably 'scientific.' These new words . . . were fashioned to impress, an air of profundity being imparted by the particularly scientific letters k, x and o = Kodak, Kleenex, Sapolio. The new technological words were sinful hybrids like 'electrocute,' or misunderstood phrases like 'personal equation,' 'nth degree...