Word: distractive
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...from sentimentality as well as musicological pedantry. To make up for the narrow dynamic range of the guitar, he achieves dramatic effects with an extraordinary variety of tonal colors. Subtle, jazzlike rhythms, throbbing chords, silvery lines, harplike plinks, resonant harpsichord and piano tones, all serve not to decorate or distract but to clarify the structure of the music...
...draping his actors in window arches and at ladies' feet, draping their faces with wigs and putty. The actors, for their part, cannot always keep the play's eloquence under control. Paul Glaser, as the hero crying to be hanged, is all forensic and fingerpointing, but often his gestures distract from his lines, and sometimes he loses the thread of the poetry in his forced jauntiness. Nancy McDoniel, the lady accused of witchcraft, smiles and enthuses as constantly as a Dickens heroine with never a trace of the wryness and mystery in her part...
Though part of the harassment is an effort to distract U.S. attention from South Viet Nam, the bigger reason for North Korea's provocations is to divert its own people's thoughts from their deepening economic troubles. "The Communist actions," says General Charles Bonesteel III, the United Nations and U.S. Eighth Army commander in Korea, "are nasty and vicious, but they amount largely to frustrated impotency...
...creditors know that he cannot pay them all off -and that he will give first priority to those who bother him least about the delay. The plain fact is that Nasser could not pay even if he wanted to. His country is nearly bankrupt, and he hopes to distract his people from that looming fact by blaming Egypt's troubles on others...
...Mercedes-Benz sits forlornly in the garage; his clubs never see him. Lean, rather gaunt, with piercing dark eyes, he has succumbed to the work ethic. He explains that he does not want to face all the outside world's trivia?small talk, party joining?that might distract him from his work. Nor does he have the distractions of a family. Hefner was divorced from Millie eight years ago. Their two children live with his exwife, who has remarried...