Word: downright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CONCERN FOR the well-being of animals cannot be left to individual researchers, for while most professors show great concern for the suffering of animals, other researchers lose perspective on what they are doing. Some unnecessary and downright cruel research does take place. The Draize test, which involved the testing of cosmetic substances on the corneas of rabbits, was replaced by more reasonable tests only after protection groups began to protest...
...were struck by the tone of many of the letters received. Some correspondents took the care to convincingly present their point of view in a straightforward manner, eschewing nastiness in favor of serious efforts to make us change our minds. But others--more than a few, in fact--were downright vicious...
...Vine, the monocled correspondent of the London Daily Express: "She looked like she had backed a loser at the Newmarket races." Despite such signs of royal pique, her press secretary, Michael Shea, insisted that the Queen was unfazed by the weather. "She loves it," he declared. Then Shea got downright fulsome in finding silver linings: "The Queen's life is so planned to the second that it is a pleasing change for her to have things go awry every so often...
Even McManus concedes that at "one time" anti-Semitism pervaded the John Birch Society. But he adds that anyone who accuses the JBS today as being anti-Semitic is a downright liar. The ADL, wouldn't say that any longer...
...comedy of humors, which was at base the comedy of consistent thought and action. A humor, as Elizabethan playwrights defined it, was an exaggerated human trait, a leaning of disposition so severe as to create a caricature. Thus a character in a comedy of humors would be called Squire Downright, and only downright would he act. In 1900, Henri Bergson proposed an elaborate theory of laughter based on just such a condition. Bergson held that we expect all things human, or connected to the human, to be pliant and fluid. Therefore any demonstration of human inflexibility is potentially funny...