Word: donnish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...changing character of labor, full employment, new housing, the new way of living based on the telly, the frig and the car, and the glossy magazines-all these have had an effect on our political strength," said Gaitskell. Labor's response, he said, raising a donnish finger and pursing his lips for emphasis, must not be to repeat past failures-"we have to show them that we are a modern 20th century party." Elderly party leaders on the platform looked stonily out over the unmoved audience...
...century B.C. Greece, for example, he respects Anaximander's intuition that man is biologically related to fish, but laughs at his injunction that therefore man should not eat fish. "Whether our brethren of the deep cherish equally delicate sentiments towards us is not recorded," Russell snuffles in a donnish gibe. It is almost as if the Greek fellow were declining the Dover sole as guest of the author at Trinity High Table...
Turning 25, Japan's slender, donnish Prince Akihito downed green tea and bean cakes at a sedate trio of parties (one with his kin, another with Fiancee Michiko Shoda, a third with 60 old classmates at Gakushuin University), tentatively accepted a birthday gift designed to cement the bonds between the budget-conscious imperial family and a local construction firm: an offer to build the foundations and outer shell (cost: $150,000) of Akihito's new, 45-room palace for a kowtowing $27.78. Apparently more concerned with imperial honor than with imperial bargains, however, Tokyo's noisy newspapers...
...Question, takes the easygoing view that language is what its users make of it. It is usually Critic Brown who is the first to cry Fowler. Both quick-witted, the two men also strike sparks with contrasting personalities: stocky Evans, 52, often rides roughshod over the conversation with a donnish cackle and a rapid, sing-song voice that strikes some listeners like chalk drawn across a blackboard; lean, white-haired Brown, 57, a veteran lecturer and darling of women's clubs, is a courtly Kentuckian with effortless charm...
Side of the Angels. Wadsworth imbued the Guardian with his own puckishness, his donnish verbosity, his love for the elegant phrase. The paper often exasperates other newsmen with its quill-pen essayist's approach to the day's hard news, is designed for those who lounge as they read. It often irritates politicians with toplofty editorials suggesting that the paper is not only on the side of the angels but right alongside them in heaven. Snorted Winston Churchill in 1950: "What a remarkable position of superiority...