Word: dourness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Irving Langmuir (1932), General Electric chemist, dour, hard-working student of high vacuums and surface tensions, largely responsible for modern electric lights...
After a national plebiscite Canada's William Lyon Mackenzie King took the power, through an order-in-council, to send conscripts abroad-but has not used it. Last week Australia's dour, lank John Curtin sought the same power. Before Parliament was a draft-act amendment that, if it did not carry, might cause his Government to fall. To U.S. soldiers who had come 8,000 miles to help defend Australia, it seemed ludicrous that Australian troops, aside from volunteers, could not move freely throughout the South Pacific. But the Labor Party's no-conscript-overseas plank...
...close of World War I, Europe's great musical culture suddenly began to express itself in what to many sounded like groans and cackles. Only a few oldsters such as Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff, clung to the traditional sonorities. In Vienna dour Composer Arnold Schönberg led a whole school of younger men in what sounded to conventional ears like some weird insult. In Paris, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger and a group of Left-Bank revolutionists began imitating African tom-toms and hopefully setting restaurant menus to music. U.S. composers in the main followed...
Died. Henrietta Remsen Meserole Manney Westley (professionally: Helen Westley), 63, veteran character actress; in Middlebush, NJ. Dour-faced, fire-eyed and testy-tongued, she specialized in playing disreputable old wrecks. She was one of the founders of the Theatre Guild. She was the fifth famed character actress to die in recent weeks (the others: Dame Marie Tempest, May Robson, Edna May Oliver, Laura Hope Crews...
...theory of the frontier to Admiral Mahan's theories of the influence of sea power. Mahan's faith in a British and American crusade committing the U.S. to a "world-spanning imperialist mission in the name of Christ and civilization" is posed against Mark Twain's dour disbelief in extending the blessings of civilization to "Our Brother Who Sits in Darkness...