Word: awkwardnesses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After the Bobbsey Twins. In Hollywood, mentioning Kinsey was one of the few ways to break up a gin rummy game. Radio comedians, ever on the alert against censorship, tested the water with such gags as: "He's at the awkward age-you know, too old for the Bobbsey Twins and too young for the Kinsey report...
...father hated Mirabeau. "He is crossgrained, fantastic, fiery, awkward, with a drift to evil before he knows of it or is capable of it. ... I shall go on dragging my son along without knowing what river to throw him into." Mirabeau almost died of smallpox at three, was disfigured by it. All the children (his parents had eleven) were caught in the cross fire of their family quarrels. His father brought his mistress into their home. His mother gave "her lover, an officer, a certificate of her full satisfaction"-a document which fell into her husband's hands...
...Zionists argued desperately for their 50-year-old dream of an independent Jewish state. They had the U.S. Government in an awkward corner. Not only had the U.S. put its signature to partition; without U.S. sponsorship the plan would never have passed. They put forth practical as well as moral arguments: the Arabs needed U.S. dollars as much as the U.S. needed Arabian oil. No matter how they raged, the Arabs would not kill such a golden-egg-laying goose...
...nosy face which wrinkles easily into a vinegarish smile under a widow's peak of crinkly hair. He has a very English embarrassment about expressing emotion about anything. He is rarely a talker, usually a listener -a lanky, youthful but somehow worn-looking young man who is painfully awkward with strangers. Around his Suffolk coast home at Aldeburgh-the setting of Peter Grimes-the local folk are used to seeing him walking on the beach, or driving at a conservative speed in his huge old cream-colored Rolls-Royce...
That cold December day in 1903, a gusty north wind was blowing across the sand dunes of North Carolina's coast. The wind blew sand into the eyes of Wilbur and Orville Wright as they moved their awkward flying machine out of its shed at Kitty Hawk. Orville, a short, neat man with a heavy mustache, stretched himself flat on his stomach on the lower wing, between the two chain-driven propellers. The twelve-horsepower engine coughed, spat and began to clatter. With Wilbur running alongside holding one wing, the plane teetered down its wooden launching rail and rose...