Word: dourness
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...admitted wistfully that "one would have to have the hide of a rhinoceros not to be affected by the criticism." But he defended his apprenticeship for the job. "After all, for five years it was my job to explain foreign policy to the Commonwealth." Officials used to his rather dour predecessor, Selwyn Lloyd, were charmed by Home's wit and informality (Home rides up front in official cars, putting the Scotland Yard man in the back). His subordinates were also surprised at his grasp of the issues...
...influenza epidemic and George S. Kaufman's first play opened in Manhattan in 1918, and the play was vastly less contagious. With dour glee, the 28-year-old writer went around advising people to avoid crowds-see Someone in the House." The flop was satisfying proof to Kaufman of "the gross inadequacies of the human race"-from which, as his collaborator Moss Hart observed, the playwright suffered daily. But he mined his suffering profitably; over the years he produced more memorable wisecracks and more hit comedies than anyone else in the U.S. theater. Last week. Kaufman died...
Died. George Wilson ("Molly") Malone, 70, dour, right-wing Nevada Republican, a onetime collegiate middleweight boxing champ who, during two U.S. Senate terms (1947 to 1959), flailed away at foreign aid, NATO, reciprocal trade, statehood for Hawaii and Alaska, was one of Joe McCarthy's loudest backers and pride of the silver lobby; of cancer; in Washington...
...parodying scholarspeak, of course. Nobody in the Journal is that wretched. But in my present dour mood it seems all too plausible that courses at Harvard have broken intelligent students like those in the Journal of the habit of writing English. With the exception of Mr. Campbell's piece, which is written in an engaging mixture of tough-guy journalese and scholarspeak, all the contributions to the May Journal share an identical set of mannerisms which I take to be the rotund and doggedly impersonal tone of the properly house-broken scholar...
...Genius." The recipient of these accolades was born to the name of Charles Edouard Jeanneret in the dour Jura mountain village of La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a few miles from the French border. His parents were Protestants, descendants of the heretical Albigenses who took refuge in the town in the 13th and 14th centuries. His father, a stolid leader of the local Alpine Club, was an enameler of watch faces. His mother, who died last year at 100, trained her oldest son, Albert, to be a musician, and told Charles Edouard: "You will be a genius...