Word: downrightness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Among wriggling dormitories and three-cornered orange peels on the MIT campus, an awesome cylinder of bricks is being raised heavenward. That this unique type of structure be erected as a place of worship is more than ironically sagacious: it is downright shrewd. For, especially here on the MIT campus, form must follow function, in this case, to inspire divine thoughts in the pragmatic-and-recently sobered heads of MIT scientific supermen. the problem of directing brains from the mechanisms of Ac-DC current, the path of least resistance, to thoughts of the spirit, the divine essence and meaning...
...floodlighted for night play. But as its Saudi employees learn to live more like Americans, Aramco itself becomes more Saudi. In its relations with the government and 53-year-old King Saud, Aramco maintains a policy so studiously circumspect that sometimes it seems to its younger workers to be downright spineless. Often it proves bitter as gall to the American workers...
...song entitled "Flip, Flop and Fly" the line occurs "When I get lonely, I jump on the telephone." ON first hearing, this sentiment seems somewhat ridiculous, if not downright neurotic. You try to visualize someone stamping and kicking and jumping on the telephone because he is lonely. It just doesn't seem right. Then you think of substituting "at" for "on," and the line begins to take on new meaning. When you visualize a person "jumping at" the telephone, it is an easy step from there to the final explication, "When I am lonely, I jump up from where...
Himself a longtime newsman (Philadelphia Record, New York Post), Author Grafton has found no startling truths about big crime-his plot in the end becomes downright hokum-but he offers many fascinating insights: how it feels before a holdup, the psychology of crap shooting, the relaxed domesticity enjoyed by the off-duty criminal. He can also be quietly amusing, as when he compares a detective's carefully indirect questions about a robbery ("I hear some pals stopped in to see you last night") to a modern poet who must find "some oblique and more beautiful way of indicating what...
...more colorful colleagues, the bristle-haired Scottish microbe hunter working in a cluttered laboratory at London's St. Mary's Hospital seemed downright dull. But he was nothing if not dogged. He was 47 years old, and he had spent 20 years trying to find something to kill the microbes that cause infections in man, especially in wounds. To no avail; he found a substance in human tears that killed some germs, but not the important ones...