Word: damnedest
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Strong Objector. Great Britain, which was neither very worried nor very hopeful about Bretton Woods, was just going to do her damnedest to make Bretton Woods and its related arrangements work well for Britain. Bretton Woods was part & parcel of the larger deal with the U.S. whereby Britain got a loan she badly needed, and in return promised to relax the exchange controls and imperial preferences which had bolstered her trade within the sterling area. British objections were aimed at two features of the Bretton Woods plan...
...Britain and America take a chance? Or shall the two countries hold the line now-on the Elbe and Danube-and do their damnedest to keep what is left of Europe as free as America and England? We don't have to fight the Russians to save something of Europe. But if we are interested in keeping some of Europe democratic, we ought to declare that to be our policy and make it plain to the Europeans themselves, and to the Russians...
...Christ, man!" exploded Dos Passes, "how do you find time ... to worry about all that stuff? . . . We're living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history - if you want to go to pieces I think it's absolutely O.K. but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it . . . instead of spilling it in little pieces." And soon Fitzgerald, with amazing fortitude, set out to do just that. "I never blame failure," he told his daughter Frances, "but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort." In The Last Tycoon he made...
...barring troop movements on a hitherto unheard-of scale, there is still no evidence that travel by rail must be limited to essential trips. Most railroaders agree with the harried Union Pacific official who held his head last week and groaned: "Our dispatchers are collecting the damnedest set of ulcers you ever saw . . . but the only thing we have had to do is to tell some of these guys that, if they don't mind an upper, they can have it now. That's all it has really meant-changing the habits of the way people travel...
...know it. ... I'm short-tempered. I don't want yes-men around me. . . . I'm arbitrary-but I get things done." His intimate adviser, big, handsome, dark Mike Straus, interrupted: "I'll say he's arbitrary. He's ornery, hardheaded, the damnedest, most unreasonable hot-headed man you ever saw." Ickes spoke up mildly, with almost childlike eagerness, peering over the tops of his spectacles: "You see? Listen to him. See how he talks to me. But I don't want any yes-men working...