Word: donnish
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...shipyards, in grimy Liverpool, Manchester or Nottingham, redbricks* were originally founded to nurture local talents. Amenities were few: Leicester's main building (sooty yellow brick) was once the county asylum; the library still has padded cells. Redbrick graduates, generally 9-to-5 commuter students with no chance for donnish tea and tutorials, were hardly considered "educated"-though they included such talents as Novelists D. H. Lawrence (Nottingham) and C. P. Snow (Leicester). Oxbridge so scorned the breed that to this day it insists on calling redbrick Ph.D.s...
...school's first students have been startled at the rolled-up-sleeves attitude of their seven top U.S. faculty members. They expected donnish tea and talk from Dean Alvin D. Loving, a U.S. Negro, instead found him wading in the mud, bossing construction workers. Even old Oxonians now gruffly praise the notion that education can honor "the dignity of labor," and that professors should research sociological and economic problems. Half the country's university students are now studying not Blackstone, Cicero or Tennyson but science and medicine...
...involved." The Law and the Profits, well illustrated by Cartoonist Robert C. Osborn, is twice as long and half as funny. Grappling with the tax spiral and inane bureaucratic waste, the onetime Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya has understandably lost some of his donnish laughter...
...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...