Word: copybook
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...about everywhere else in the U.S. for the past 18 years, he began playing it last week on Broadway. To Broadway, which found five years long enough for Oklahoma!, those 18 years seemed either a miracle or a misprint. Not that the idea of the play-which inverts a copybook moral-isn't amusing enough. Henry Dewlip begins as a rakish, well-adjusted bachelor, is misled into sowing his tame oats, and then happily restored to rakishness...
...when he was born, was an ossified 18th Century society. It was elegant yet genteel; it was ruled by the blistering aristocratic candor and the simple aristocratic naivety; it was naturally irreverent, as aristocratic societies are; it was libertine in word, but preserved the trite, conventional and charming copybook morality of the 18th Century in action. When he died, Shaw was really a hundred years older than his admitted age, as sweet and prim and gentle as anyone out of Goldsmith...
Like many another copybook maxim, the old saw about an idle mind being the devil's workshop has validity in psychiatry as well as in everyday life. A little over a year ago, Psychiatrist Louis F. Verdel, manager of the Veterans Administration Hospital at Northport, N.Y., began an experiment that leaned heavily on the maxim. Dr. Verdel decided to keep a test group of mental patients so busy that they would have no time to mope, brood or withdraw from reality...
...curtain and an unbridgeable gulf between the Executive and the Legislature. The Executive-President, Cabinet and the rest-are not responsible to Congress and so do not have control of Congress . . . [Our elections] are not . . . declarations by the electorate on important issues before them, but merely variations on old copybook maxims such as "Don't change horses in midstream" or "People do not generally vote against prosperity...
Still sticking by the copybook, Wilson, a moderate drinker and smoker, will keep on walking at least a mile every night for exercise, taking an interest in local government and the Boy Scouts, commuting from Glen Ridge, N.J., where he lives in a seven-room house with his wife and 17-year-old daughter. His new job (salary: over $75,000 a year) will mean no change in his routine, except that "the night force will be seeing a lot more...