Word: churlish
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...love with China. Senators now vie for invitations to Peking. Tourism to the People's Republic has gone from privilege to fad. Chinoiserie is the rage of the boutique. Indeed, in the situation ethics of detente, when President and Premier could chat like old comrades, it seems churlish to recall that the Communist takeover of China once precipitated something close to a national nervous breakdown...
...novel's dreary lives are redeemed in the telling. Bainbridge's ear catches the tang of Liverpudlian argot ("My word, we do look a bobby dazzler"). The sisters' petty quarrels are small excursions of humanity in straitened circumstances. When Rita learns that her churlish soldier is illiterate, her dismayed brain is soon assuaged by her emotions. "Dear God, she thought, running up the cobbled alleyway, if he was that unschooled, he would need her, he would want to hold her in his life." Bainbridge unwisely changes her novel into a standard shocker on the final pages...
...grunt, I feel a certain churlish resentment about the solicitous attention the returning P.O.W.s are receiving. It seems to me that the draftees who faced the war 24 hours every day on the ground are deserving of somewhat more than a veto of the VA hospital appropriations bill and a dismal employment rate. Why were we sneaked back into pur society? So our country can more easily forget the crimes we committed in its name...
...Meany had won the round inside the hall, he clearly lost it outside. In a situation where he had the upper hand, he came across as churlish and vindictive. Labor strategists conceded later that it might have been better tactics to smother the President with kindness rather than cold-shoulder him. As the convention continued last week, he tried to recover lost ground. He told the delegates that he had not intended to give the President an inferior seat. "When you go back over the history, John F. Kennedy sat in that chair. Lyndon Johnson sat in that chair...
...later. It is a syntax of fantasy, the color swelling and glowing, all heaviness gone. There was probably never an artist with less fearsomeness than Klee; his conventional signs for sun, tree, body or fish are so unpretentious, epigrammatic and neat that one accepts them at once-it seems churlish not to. But he was not a mysterious artist, and the pathos of his last paintings, like The Angel of Death, 1940, is really a failed sense of foreboding-failed, because his signs could hardly accommodate real fear. The crusty paint on ragged burlap, the blurred and bulbous shapes...