Word: downright
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is, of course, plenty of dissent from that view. Tolstoy failed to find opera godlike; in fact he found it downright godless. In his essay What Is Art? he gives a withering description of an opera rehearsal and rants against the absurdities he found onstage: "What they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas. People do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions." In a similar vein, Dr. Johnson called opera "an exotic and irrational entertainment...
...Administration had not asked for the resolution, and it seemed downright embarrassed when the House passed it last week by the overwhelming margin of 312 to 52 votes. The resolution established no new policy, offered no new recommendations, gave the President no new powers, had no binding force. Yet it was significant because it publicly stated what has become a hard fact of life: the U.S. cannot afford any more Communist takeovers among the nations of Latin America. The resolution proclaimed the right of the U.S. or any other American republic to intervene, with "armed force" if need...
...Deliberate Incitement." Outside attempts to help the city's Negroes have met with resistance from the mayor. In 1962, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent an investigative team to the city, Yorty was downright hostile, warned it not to serve as "a sounding board for dissident elements and irresponsible charges." The mayor's relations with the Federal Government reached the breaking point over the city's anti-poverty program, which has been snarled from the start. Yorty rejected demands by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity that he accept representatives of "the poor...
Internal Revenue Commissioner Sheldon Cohen recently seemed downright sheepish when he publicly admitted that some of his Service's agents used wiretaps and even more sophisticated instruments of snoopery to get evidence against tax dodgers, both real and imagined. "Neither I nor my closest assistants knew until quite recently of departures from the Service's prescribed policies," he told Missouri Democrat Edward V. Long, chairman of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigating federal encroachments on citizens' privacy. Cohen promised to right any injustices, then said of his agents: "While we must temper their zeal with controlled judgment...
...away on an overnight trip, Andi invites Sarah out to her remote country mansion to help baby-sit. Crank calls are the girls' favorite diversion. The usual ploy: "I saw what you did and I know who you are." It is a dubious icebreaker at best, but downright troublesome when addressed to an unstable suburbanite (John Ireland) who that very evening has carved up his wife with a kitchen knife and buried her body in the woods. To the girls he sounds "sexy ... a swinger." They phone again...