Word: cavil
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President Johnson's moves to correct the U.S.'s balance of payments deficit were painful to some, controversial to many, and likely to damage the nation's own interests if left in effect too long. Yet the objective was beyond cavil: to prevent recent attacks on the dollar and the speculative rush for gold from growing into an international financial crisis that could undermine prosperity around the world...
...valley is a microcosm of country life, and the young paternalistic squire who owns it wants only to keep it free of the incursions of progress. If the idyllic life he envisions for his tenants has more than a bearable streak of treacle, it is hard to cavil at the squire's well-meant fatherliness. Births, deaths, maids slipping into the shrubbery with the lads of their choice, the dotty and the shrewd, the pleasures of the bed and the hum of local politics-nothing escapes the chronicler's notice. But after a while the detail be comes...
...burning question mark of this sumptuous adaptation is Audrey Hepburn's casting as Eliza, the role that Julie Andrews had clearly been born to play. Purists may cavil that Hepburn's singing voice, most of it dubbed by Soprano Marni Nixon, sounds too much like Julie and not enough like Audrey. But after a slow start, when the practiced proficiency of her cockney dialect suggests that Actress Hepburn is really only slumming, she warms her way into a graceful, glamorous performance, the best of her career...
...Critics cavil that not enough countries are represented at the New York World's Fair. Such critics, said Robert Moses, 75, offhandedly plucking a barb from the bulrushes, wonder why there is no exhibit from such as "the Sultan of Kuwait with his bottomless oil, Cadillacs, harems, heat, sand flies and camel dung." That kind of joke is as old as Moses, but tiny Kuwait was not amused. "Grossly unfactual references," said Talat Al-Ghoussein, Kuwait's Ambassador to the U.S., in a stiff note to the Fair president. Oil there is, to be sure...
...Bloch couple cavil at one another largely to disguise the monotony of their marriage; indeed, escape from boredom is a dominant motif in this Advocate. Miss Seager's prisoner braids straw into rope for nine pages; Fields' defeated heroine chain-smokes and walks those back-alley streets so familiar to devotees of the garbage-can school of prose; Porter's Margaret thinks of herself as "a character in an impossibly dull novel" (a self-interpretation which Porter threatens to actualize). This preoccupation with boredom strikes us as significant. We have heard that content must determine form...