Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...vexatious problem when he wrote his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country. Swift's proposal was to fatten the children and then eat them. Swift wrote in irony. The Prohibition Bureau is in earnest. The goal of its research is a poison which will kill...
Last week the politicians of France seemed at last somewhat chastened. Premier Herriot had fallen after only two days in office. As an earnest that they were willing to break party lines for once, some 300 Deputies, headed by Deputy Morinaud of Constantine, Algeria-a political nobody-signed a petition requesting that the President designate some outstanding statesman to form a Cabinet in which all parties would unite to save the franc. Naturally, M. Doumergue chose the potent War-President of France, the representative of French "Big Business," M. Raymond Poincaré. Soon Poincaré "presented" to M. le President...
Unhampered by the presence of tedious experts, equipped with a sizable packet of Left-Centrist votes, and relying, for at least toleration, upon the faction of his youth, the Right, M. Caillaux, super-demagogue, was in a position last week to begin once more in earnest the dance of intrigue, which to him is life...
...will the importance of being earnest be forgotten by those who stay behind. A student college-camp has already opened in the Catskills for the summer, a camp of "doers" who are resolved to depend upon no external stimulus for their vigorous thought but to lecture to each other on "problems of the day" that they are severally exercised about...
...going about his business in Paris, lunching frequently with Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos and even H. G. Wells, when a copy of Black Laughter by Sherwood Anderson reached him and caused him a bit of a pain. Perhaps other people were similarly affected by that earnest study of a dissatisfied newspaperman who abandoned his wife and wandered around until he got another man's wife, whose Negro servants laughed to see such sport. If so, here is solace. For with due respect to Critic H. L. ("Hatrack") Mencken and the allegedly significant Chicago school...