Word: downrightness
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...hall, no one will be surprised"; (on Vice Presidential Nominee Glen Taylor): "Soak a radio clown for ten days and ten nights in the rectified juices of all the cow-state Messiahs ever heard of, and you will have him to the life"; (on the convention): "The percentage of downright half-wits has been definitely lower than in, say, the Democratic Convention...
Some political parties might consider a crashing defeat at the polls a good excuse for taking a back seat for a while. Finland's Communists, made of sterner stuff -and with sterner bosses-were more than willing to deny themselves that luxury. It would be downright unpatriotic, suggested Communist Minister Hertta Kuusinen-Leino last week, to let anti-Communists run the country just because they had won the election (TIME, July 12). "We would do better outside the government as opposition," the lady minister confessed, "but we put the country's interests first and therefore insist on taking...
Another agricultural cult popular with city gardeners is "organic farming." Organic matter is an important component of soils, says Dr. Kellogg, "but the advocates of the organic matter doctrine go very far. They insist that ... the usual chemical fertilizers are downright poisonous to soils; that the liberal use of compost gives special qualities to plants-they will be free of insects and diseases; and that animals, or even people, will be ever so much more healthy by eating plants grown 'the organic way.' " Most of this is silly, says Dr. Kellogg politely. Organic compost is no cureall...
Veblen believed that modern machinery was the latest expression of this natural instinct; he concluded that refusal to use the maximum machinery was not only economically silly but downright unnatural. The machine's chief enemy, he argued, was a moss-backed array of old-fashioned institutions and traditions - and he set out to blow them apart. In his first and most fascinating book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he coldly scrutinized the various ways in which the successful businessman struggled to evade his debt to the very machine which had made him rich...
...then a downright embarrassing thing happened. Redheaded Christine Johnston, who says the governor is the father of her baby boy (TIME, March 15), filed 264 questions she wanted Jim to answer before her paternity suit goes to court. Hadn't Jim told Billy Pichelmayer that he and Christine were married and that she was pregnant? And hadn't he said: "Billy, us men ought to keep our wives barefooted and pregnant"? And hadn't Jim changed the baby's diapers and fed him his bottle...