Word: captiousness
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Lost in an Echo. The captious sea is at once Admiral Jimmy Thach's ally and enemy. Sound, his chief means of detection, travels almost five times faster through water than through air, and it plays more tricks than a Soviet delegate at a peace conference. "The ocean," says Thach, "is a liquid jungle. Survival depends on how well we know this environment and whether, like Tarzan, we can tell the friendly sounds from the unfriendly ones-the monkeys from the tigers...
...orders for 1960, the most ballyhooed play of the year, My Fair Lady, opened in London for what looked like a long, long run. Headed by the same principals (Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway) who starred in it on Broadway, Lady captivated most of the city's captious critics (said the Times: "A musical comedy of the first water"), who often delight in panning U.S. productions. Afterward, temperamental, triumphant Actor Harrison, escorted by Cinemactress Wife Kay Kendall, gamely offered a limp hand to a wellwisher...
...commentators' phrases about the Prime Minister had changed to "jaunty, nonchalant, a sure and easy hand." "One of those astonishing reversals of political form that so often confound the pundits," said the Manchester Guardian. Even Laborites accorded him grudging admiration. In the Daily Mirror Richard Grossman, the usually captious Laborite M.P., admitted that Macmillan was giving the Tories "just the kind of dashing, decisive leadership they expected but never got from poor Sir Anthony Eden...
Through its bimonthly magazine Social Action, the Congregational Christian Churches' Council for Social Action has served up some intelligent, if sometimes captious criticism of what is wrong with the church and the nation.* In the current issue, subtitled "Christian Faith and the Protestant Churches," Social Action asks some searching questions about the current philosophy of U.S. Protestantism...
...captious German movie critic once called her "die Oelige Ziege" (oily goat) because of the slippery way she slid around mountain peaks in her movies. But to Dictator Adolf Hitler, sinuous suntanned Leni Riefenstahl, the daughter of a Berlin plumber, seemed the perfect female embodiment of Aryan strength through joy. Under Adolf's patronage, Actress-Producer Leni became the reigning queen of German moviedom. Given the job of filming the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Leni produced a picture as artful as it was artistic. It took top critical honors at Italy's International Film Festival...