Word: downrightness
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...familiar old tango, El Choclo; she decided the brooding rhythm made it "sound like a dirge," souped it up with a beguine tempo. But she also credits the lyrics. They are not too cheerful ("You record a happy song today, and you lay a bomb"*), in fact they are downright masochistic: Though it burns me and it turns me into ashes, / My whole world crashes without your kiss of fire...
...Buildup. Even the most competent newspaper editor, says Davis, is often so convinced of the need to be objective that when he spots a "downright misstatment of facts" in a speech, he never follows it with a bracketed insert to the effect that "This simply is not so." If the Honorable John P. Hoozis is an important person, "you [may still] see him quoted at length in newspapers on almost any subject, with no indication that he knew nothing at all about it ... To do that would be editorializing, interpreting the news, failing in objectivity...
...went $6,000,000 in the red. For a time, LeTourneau spent $100,000 a month merely servicing machinery that had broken down. But at length he perfected his new devices, and dug his way into the black again in 1949. Bankers who had complained of LeTourneau's "downright stubbornness" began referring again to his "dauntless spirit...
...named Flood, who built up a tidy 18th-century fortune in the slave trade, and it sold more than 600,000 copies in all editions. Three years ago, in Twilight on the Floods, Author Steen brought the family up to the late 19th century, and showed them ebbing into downright respectability. Now, in Jehovah Blues, she puts a short and almost dispirited postscript to the story; the Floods have evaporated to a small perfume-puddle of neurosis named Aldebaran...
...well-established figures as Tennessee Williams, Thomas Merton and Christopher Isherwood. Moreover, the idea seems to have been to pick the most sedate examples of advance-guard writing that could be found. The result is that, while highbrow esoterica is avoided, so is highbrow boldness. Only one piece is downright bad: Tennessee Williams' tasteless closet drama about D. H. Lawrence. The rest read comfortably enough, but seldom sparkle...