Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After fussing and feuding through their longest government-making crisis since World War II, Italy's politicians handed the job of putting together a Cabinet to a long-jawed lawyer from the mountain town of Ascoli Piceno. Dour and taciturn, Fernando Tambroni, 58, is a staunch conservative who has been in and out of Christian Democratic governments for seven years, most recently as the Finance Minister whose hardfisted fiscal policies have helped make the lira one of the world's soundest currencies. On his first try over three weeks ago, Tambroni offered a rightist Cabinet dependent...
...eyes of the assembled garrison, is branded on the hips with the letter D for deserter; the Indian encampment of Rainbow Son-Horgan's fictional version of Geronimo-deep in Mexico's Sierra Madre. Curiously, the battlescapes are poorly drawn, and may result from Horgan's dour knowledge that the Apaches invariably melted away when confronted with regular troops. Unfortunately for the balance of his book, the weight of a growing nation and the determination of Hazard and his cavalrymen seem excessive when they are opposed by only a handful of barbaric and ill-equipped savages...
...kept at the boil; there he melted down human and animal corpses to get fresh skeletons for his grisly pathological museum of pickled fetuses, stuffed one-eyed pigs and cock-plumed hens. There may have been, as his contemporaries thought, more madness than method in his research, but dour John Hunter (1728-93) as much as any man helped turn surgery and pathology into sciences...
...policeman. Life has changed little since Genoese Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, creating a path that many Italians have followed since. The people of San Marco live mainly on chestnuts and vegetables, seldom taste meat, except on four feast days each year. Last week the dour and cagey villagers danced self-consciously in the streets before the cameras that had come to record the biggest event ever to take place in San Marco d'Urri...
Understandably, enthusiasm ran high over at normally-dour Eliot Hall last night, and no one could say too much for the competitors. "It was just wonderful. I guess we're pretty good in the water," one of the Eliot swimmers declared huskily after the marathon...