Word: downrightness
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...critics, on the other hand, tore into the Met like hungry hawks. Much of what they had to say was deserved. Yet, for a nation where opera has been in a low state for many years, some of the criticism seemed downright tendentious. Le Monde found Barber "an ungainly spectacle." The orchestra "lacked finesse," the "comic effects were so broad that they seemed destined for a public with numb wits." Perhaps the most devastating crack of all came from France-Soir. Describing Soprano Peters' singing, Critic Jean Cotte wrote: "At each note America was risking another Pearl Harbor." Paris...
...home." Remembering that the churches flourished during the Japanese occupation of Burma in World War II, older missionaries are confident that Christianity's convert leaders (among them 750 Baptist ministers) can carry on successfully. Younger clergymen, however, are not so sure, and the Roman Catholics are downright pessimistic. More than half of the Catholic clergy are foreign-born, including five of Burma's eight bishops, and the country has only one, poorly staffed, college-level seminary...
Highway Stress. ECG changes in patients with known heart disorders were more puzzling and in some cases downright alarming, reported Dr. Thomas Killip III. A man of 20 who had no evidence of clear-cut heart disease had complained for years of occasional palpitations and extra heartbeats, even at rest. While wearing his ECG recorder he drove from New York to Princeton. What appeared to the cardiologists as dangerous bouts of nonrhythmic ventricular action occurred while the man was apparently unaware of them and doing 60 m.p.h. or more on the New Jersey Turnpike. He is now on digitalis, said...
...good pun and a useful one in a century overburdened with Bonapartes. Like a swarm of corpulent drones they rose from the thickets of Corsica and fell with a sodden thump on the sinecures of empire. Noisy, ugly, greedy, provincial, quarrelsome, ostentatious, lewd and downright criminal, they terrorized Europe off and on from 1801 to 1870 and frightened Napoleon himself almost as much as the Grand Alliance did. All through his reign they ridiculed, insulted and cheated him, and when he needed them most a number of them cynically betrayed him to his enemies. Of all modern dynasties, the Bonapartes...
...scarred musician will attest, one of the quickest ways to lose friends is to engage in the precarious art of chamber music. With everyone trying to be boss, squabbles over interpretation can become downright nasty. And with the members of the de Pasquale String Quartet - Joseph, 45, viola; Francis, 44, cello; Robert, 37, and William, 32, violins - it's even more so. They fight constantly. The difference is, they revel in it. But then they are brothers, and this, they explain, is the secret to successful shouting contests...