Word: clod
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...wants to test its new moonship with a guinea pig before sending up a crew of expensively trained cosmonauts. He must be a human guinea pig, because a guinea-pig guinea pig would be an affront to the animal-doting British public. NARSTI's choice is a cheerful clod (Kenneth More) who has been fired from his job as a lab animal for common-cold researchers because he is too healthy to interest any germs. More is set to training with the cosmonauts...
...World War II days, just when the job began to seem respectable. "Agents even urged line pilots to buy insurance." But he brushed too close to disaster too often; he realized how the unexpected can upset an actuary's figures. He remembers a ham-handed clod named Dudley who flew copilot for a while on trans-Pacific runs. Dudley was a dud on instruments, but only after a couple of near crashes did anyone check his logbooks and find them an utter fiction. When he was fired, Dudley promptly got a job with another line and piled...
Autobiographical Confessions. Even in his past, there is a lot to fret about. He describes his early self as "show-off," "smart aleck," "clod" and "wisecracking punk," worriedly says, "I'm sure my friends thought I was a pansy. I sculpted in wood and wrote short stories...
...Captain's Table (Rank; 20th Century-Fox) is a so-so stateroom farce in which an honest clod of a freighter captain (John Gregson) is put in command of a passenger liner, only to find that it is a vessel of iniquity, whose officers are mainly concerned with smuggling cigarettes and snuggling with lady voyagers. Before long the captain has taken a pratfall into a tray of lobster newburg, walked shudderingly across a boat deck alive with cries of water-borne passion, indulged in a spirited pie-throwing match with a roomful of children, and repulsed the sort...
...Wailing. "In 1926 the school was a teacher's paradise," recalls Marson. A boy knew precisely what he was up against, from six years of English and Latin to weekly essays and monthly reports. The school banned curve-grading (the clod-coddling system based on the class average), marked only individual achievement. If it was often Dickensian, "nobody whimpered, wailed or gnashed his teeth" at the heavy load...