Word: devilish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the War Department gave harassed G.I.s better news than a 16-day furlough. The devilish leggings are on the way out. They will soon be replaced by leather combat boots ten inches high. The lower part of the boot is laced; the top part, into which the trouser leg tucks, is neatly buckled. Combat soldiers, long envious of the Germans' comfortable, homely field boot, thought it was about time...
...Brown. And that did it. Miss Bergman was braced to resist something in unshaven tweeds with a Cremo breath and a voice like a moose decoy. What she met was "so sweet and human that I decided that anyone she worked for" (Mr. Selznick walked up the walls in devilish glee) "couldn't be nearly so crazy as I expected." When, in early April 1939, the Queen Mary docked at Pier 90, the remarkable Miss Brown had in tow the richest screen potentiality of a decade...
...also a disappointment. For Miss Howe, a ranking monologuist, brings into fiction both the virtues and the faults of her art. She has a fine ear for the devilish ironies and self-betrayals of normal speech (or writing), and her whole book is nervous and vivid with them. But she has also the monologuist's weakness for overemphasis, for sacrificing psychological integrity in favor of a laugh or a sniff. Even so, The Whole Heart is an impressive, realistic piece of work...
Booby traps are the most frequently used anti-personnel mines, and no more devilish contraption has been found since gunpowder was invented. Nazis and Japanese are equally adept at using booby traps to blow to shreds unsuspecting men who pick up letters, light fires in stoves, turn doorknobs in onetime enemy territory, or pick up dead soldiers to bury them...
...about a foot high. They wear soft, pointed suede shoes (occasionally spats), tight green breeches, red jackets with a ruffle at the neck and stocking caps or flat-topped tricorn hats with a jaunty feather. They behave fairly well when pilots are flying their planes properly, but become devilish when the plane is not handled to suit them. Sometimes, being creatures of mood and humor, they make life miserable for both bad and good pilots...