Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Connemara, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland's County Galway, is bleak in winter, but in summer has a dreamy, romantic beauty. Its heather-covered hills and mountains are dotted with trout-filled lakes and riverlets. The hotels are scattered but substantial, and some are notable, such as Ballynahinch Castle, where the fishing is famous. And the food is delicious: trout and salmon, lobsters and crayfish, clams, mussels and-come September-the famous Galway oysters. Not to mention the small Connemara sheep, which range the hills where wild herbs give their meat a rare, delicate taste...
Splinters in the Dust. Chief holdout is old New York. In a memorable exchange in 1948, Architectural Critic Lewis Mumford accused Park Commissioner Robert Moses of creating playground spaces "that are merely leftovers, bleak asphalt wastes, marks of an absence of human interest and an almost positive distaste for beauty." To parents' demands that sawdust be substituted for cement, Park Commissioner Newbold Morris replied with a pungent comment on the problems of the great big city. "Sawdust gets full of splinters, broken glass, empty cigarette packages and debris. We're experimenting with a rubber compound...
...This bleak doctrine of "writing off life as a brutal absurdity" contrasts unfavorably, Pusey said, with the unwillingness of the Greeks to be overcome by the hideousness of life...
From Khartoum to Aswan, the Nile runs through bleak desert. This is Nubia, the land of the Cush, of the mud-building Fung people, of temples and heat, where the Nile hurriedly bears its load of diluted loam over transverse ribs of crystalline rock, granite and diorite-the Six Cataracts. Below the Second Cataract, it skids through a 100-mile chute, the Batn el Hagar (Belly of Stones), studded with gleaming black islets. Then below Aswan it enters the Egypt of antiquity. Here the neolithic men of North Africa gathered as the grassy Saharan plains dried up into desert following...
...equipped that it can load and unload all its own cargo without help of dock booms, can "turn around" in port in as few as five or six hours. Efficiency applies at the home office too. Turman rises at 4 a.m., breakfasts with his staff before 7 in the bleak company cafeteria. The early schedule is the only way he knows to keep up with his European competitors, who, he complains, enjoy the advantage of being six hours ahead of him on the clock...