Word: dismally
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...land of the future. He was famed among his neighbors for a strict probity in business dealings, and again & again was asked to act as executor of estates and guardian of minors. Yet he was a gambler. He gambled at cards and on horses; his project to drain the Dismal Swamp (it is only partly drained to this day) was in a line of wild American land speculation that did not end with Addison Mizner at Boca Raton. Washington gambled at war: with his neck, when he took up arms against the king, and with his army, in bold flashes...
...dismal, fitful rain stopped at last, or seemed to, shortly before the Queen was to appear. A hoarse command went up, and a bright red ribbon seemed suddenly to unroll along both edges of the Mall-the guardsmen, still beneath their big black bearskins, had doffed their raincapes by the numbers. The thousands cheered. A workman somehow got onto the Mall on a bicycle, pedaled incongruously past, tipping his hat from side to side in Chaplinesque solemnity while the crowd cheered...
...wholesale greengrocer's office in Covent Garden. Henderson, Grieve & Co. didn't know it, but this smiling, stocky braggart was going to make things pop for all of them. He started with the secretary, Florrie. In no time he had seduced her. Calling at her dismal slum home to tell her he would not marry her, Jimmy met her handsome younger sister Madge, promptly switched his affections and made Madge his mistress. As for poor Florrie, what else could she do but shine up to Herbert, a dull, decent office clerk, persuade him that she was carrying...
...pretty shallow in the childish lisp which the author conceives as "the language of the student." Analyzing Existence as "a three layer cake," the book abounds in silly metaphors, terming Christ "the penicillin of Salvation" and the Incarnation "God's rescue operation." His attempts at jazzy writing are equally dismal, whether describing a "Warm Fire" home (one in which "the smallest children pray as naturally as they reach for the peanut butter") or declaring that the Israelites, with "breaks. . . went through all the red lights to the Promised Land...
...headline: THE CLIMATE OF FEAR. Below was an article by Mirror Reporter William Connor, just returned from the U.S. A congressional investigation, wrote Connor in a fantastic comparison, "reminds you of the Communist trials, the horrible . . . Slansky affair in Prague, the grisly Mindszenty farce and a dozen other dismal puppet shows on the other side of the Iron Curtain...