Word: curtness
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...Cocteau's gaudy swoopings, soarings and occasional pancake landings among the lively arts. The value of surprise was brought home to Cocteau one day 40 years ago, when the ballet impresario Diaghilev turned a coolly monocled eye on Cocteau and quieted his cocky babble of witticisms with a curt "Astonish me!" To astonish, Cocteau has since dabbled furiously, rebelliously and often brilliantly in every branch of the arts and senses (he tried opium briefly, and then religion, also briefly). He has been sometimes hooted at, sometimes hailed and invariably noticed...
...fire stormed downhill through the basin, Geil sent in a picked crew with curt orders to dig a last-ditch firebreak. His orders: the crew must be prepared to hole up in the cliffs, to live without supplies, lay through the fire if trapped,* but "tie up" the basin. They did. Last week a ranger and three Indians with 1,200 ft. of line clambered into Kings Canyon (which drops 4,000 ft. in two miles) to keep the fire from shooting along the canyon's wall. Hemmed in, the fire came at last under control. Loss...
Tousle-haired Socialist Ollenhauer was bristling over Adenauer's curt, 250-word "volunteers bill," a stopgap measure by which der Alte hoped to have the beginnings of a German army in time for the Big Four conference. Months of legislative deliberation would be needed to create a legal structure for Adenauer's ultimate goal of a twelve-division army and 1,300-plane air force. Meanwhile, promised...
...advance of the summit parley-that the Kremlin is content for now to accept two Germanys. The offer was also meant to dramatize an awkward fact: the power to unite Germany and to restore its lost territories lies primarily with Russia. It could be done overnight by a single curt order to its hapless German satellite. It could be done without help or hindrance from the U.S., Britain or France...
...whom he had not seen for several years, Karpovich was more pleased than surprised. He would have been shocked indeed, had someone told him that this chance meeting would remove him from Russia for the rest of his life, and that it would eventually give him the title of Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at a place called Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts...