Word: dourness
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...rebellious youth, decreed that any "sonne or daughter above age of sextein yeers not being distracted [demented] shall beate or curse their father or mother shall be put to death without mercy." On the other hand, the loss of some of the old laws might be said, from a dour point of view, to contribute to modern decadence. Among them: repeal of a prohibition (1579) against "gamyng and playing, passing to tavernis and ail-houses and wilfull remaning fra [away from] the paroche kirk in tyme of ser-mone or prayers on Sonday...
...lights in the hall fade. The slide projector goes on, and there on the screen is a picture of John and Jacqueline Kennedy with a towering, dour man about whom 40 million Frenchmen may be right. Says the lecturer's voice of Charles de Gaulle: "What a wonderful leader for the French he has been. How he has sacrificed himself! The women don't make speeches in France, and Madame de Gaulle was quite surprised when I told her what the ladies do over here...
Announcing their downfall, the party mouthpiece, Rude Pravo, deliberately gave no reasons for the ousters, since a full explanation could set off a chain reaction of destalinization that might well cost dour, lackluster Novotny his job. Bacilek was top cop back in 1952 when Rudolf Slansky and ten other Red leaders were hanged in the bloodiest of Stalin's satellite show trials; Köhler also played a key role in preparing the purge. And Czechoslovaks with good memories would recall the day eleven years ago when Security Boss Bacilek publicly and effusively thanked all those who had produced...
...Oxford life is one of the best stories of an education ever told, be cause he was one of the few for whom education itself is a crucial experience. He conveys this by sketching the characters of others-a theologian talking to a poet in a pub, a dour Clydesider who became a monk, the tutor C. S. Lewis and that really odd ball of erudition, the madly neurotic Jewish poet and scholar "Eddie" Meyerstein...
...local garage owner. But Debré was determined to try again, even though he had to travel 6,000 miles to French-owned Réunion Island, a tiny volcanic rock in the Indian Ocean, where a by-election offered another opportunity to run for the Assembly. The dour, fussy Debré took no chances. He flew to the capital city of St.-Denis and campaigned vigorously, holding 70 meetings in three steaming, sweaty weeks. As was confidently predicted, Debré swamped his luckless opponent 30,908 to 7,365 , partly through the Réunion tactic known...