Word: caustically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Brass Tacks. Even in Egypt, where development has been hard hit by Nasser's foreign policy, some A.D.L. plans have borne fruit. A plan to use caustic soda in projected paper and rayon plants uncovered a highly important use for a byproduct chlorine. The chlorine, which seemed useless, can go into making sodium pentachlorophenate-a chemical that kills the river-borne parasites causing bilharziasis, a disease chronic in Egypt for centuries...
Even so, by the time the General Assembly called the first emergency special session in its eleven-year history, it was clear that the Times's caustic judgment had roweled both NBC and CBS into at least limited action (ABC pre-empted only one half-hour show the entire evening). The national chains carried spotty U.N. pickups all evening, but when Secretary Dulles appealed to the world for support, ABC was preoccupied with The Lone Ranger, NBC with Guy Lombardo and CBS with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. (But CBS did carry the late session until closing...
Nasser, says one caustic Englishman, "displays that unmistakable mark of the second-rate, the belief that human affairs can be reduced to simple, single causes." In a safe in his office he keeps a neat file of all his main problems, with the essentials of each summarized as briefly as his staff can get them down. When the dictator has to face a problem, he writes down the considerations in three columns on a piece of paper. In one column he sets down what he wants to do, in the next the obstacles, in the third his possible courses...
Prima Donna: The word has, in the mouths of the more thinking members of the musical public, taken on a half-humorous, half-caustic meaning . . . (The child who in an examination paper misspelt the term Prim Madonna was very young...
Music could mellow the caustic Mencken strain. He once moved Angoff by saying, "Schubert knew God, he knew that God, too, was afraid, that God, too, trembled and was in doubt and got angry and regretted and yearned in vain, like you and me and all of us." Though he spouted misogynisms, Mencken was deeply in love with his wife, Sara Haardt, who lived only five years after their 1930 marriage. When she was dying he told a friend, "Women are always waiting . . . women are always waiting for-birth, for kisses, for love, for growing-up, for smiles, for death...