Word: direful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Once a week or so, an elderly Negro woman stalks down the crowded sidewalks of Harvard Square and Massachusetts Avenue, crying out in a dire, haunting voice, "Prepare to meet your God!" Her hat and dress are bedraggled, and she carries a worn paper shopping bag in one hand while the other is raised in ominous prophetic warning. The passers-by either smirk or ignore her or shake their heads: the last thing any Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduate expects to do on the public streets or elsewhere is to meet his God--at least in any literal sense, as they...
From outside comes a peril more dire, if not more wearing, than hunger or boredom or claustrophobia. Nazi boots clump on the cobblestone sidewalks, and the heehaw of the paddy wagon siren sounds in the night; from their window the fugitives watch, horrified, as the greengrocer across the street, and the two Jews he has been harboring, are hauled off. In a scene more tension-packed than anything Alfred Hitchcock ever devised, two Germans search the factory by night after a burglar has broken in. As the refugees huddle breathlessly in the loft, the suspicious Germans stretch out their investigation...
...Susan Johnson had arrayed herself in a midshipman's uniform, invaded the academy, stood formation, attended mess with 3,600 midshipmen, had gaily run down dormitory corridors popping into rooms (so another account ran) and made a clean getaway. First upshot: two midshipmen charged with helping her face dire punishment, and three midshipman officers who knew of the plot were broken to the ranks (the academy first said the demotions were merely for "administrative reasons"). Second upshot: Dr. Marius Johnson grounded his high-sailing daughter Susy...
...separate community, a potential ghetto, but "a neighborhood glued onto a city." Often he ran into ugly resistance: one Swiss village refused to allow him to start a home for aged refugees because it did not want to enlarge its cemetery; a German burgomaster got a letter threatening dire consequences should...
...convictions of Pitirim A. Sorokin, director of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, and one of the most widely read social scientists alive today. The author of more than thirty books, including Social and Cultural Dynamics, The American Sex Revolution, and The Crisis of Our Age, Sorokin's dire predictions are read in twenty languages, and the body of commentary on his work is staggering...