Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...deal with it. The performance on records with John Gielgud and the movie with Michael Redgrave are both extant, and each would be definitive if the other did not exist. If anybody has managed to attain to the age of reason without having seen or heard or read Earnest, a visit to the local performance would not be a bad idea, simply because Wilde's masterpiece is too good to miss. But the rest of us would do just as well to remain content with our memories, because Repertory Boston is not distinguishing itself in its current production...
...least socialistic country in the world")* for an immigration permit and, having won it, last week on his 40th birthday asked the U.S. State Department to issue passports to himself, his wife and their three children. "I didn't arrive at this decision lightly," explained Yankus, a somber, earnest six-footer who was raised in Chicago by immigrant Lithuanian parents, saved through his early life to fulfill his dream of owning a farm. "I did it for a selfish purpose-for my children, because I can foresee the time when they would be bound hand and foot by these...
...made the main contribution with dramatic jumps, a kind of rhythmical chain-gang walk, and a Charleston-like dance step. Scenes ranged from flirtatious rambles in the market place to formally styled initiation ceremonies. One episode, simply enacting the death of a man and a witch doctor's earnest attempts to save him, conveyed the feeling of real tragedy, accompanied by chanting as insistent and haunting as Ravel's Bolero...
...pity that the prosy piece called "Beauty" had to appear on the first page, for it is clearly the worst thing in the issue. Were it not so devilishly earnest, it could easily be mistaken for parody. It attempts one of those cosmic definitions which one rarely finds outside of undergraduate writing, and which result in embarrassing mediocrity, or worse. Editor (as the author James Robinson signs himself) uses hackneyed and inconsistent metaphor, contradicts himself twice along the way, and even denies the reader the pleasure of a well-turned phrase...
...great big mountainous sports girl"). He cries to be a sports girl's racket, pressed to her breast or flying in the sunlit air. But Betjeman is not chiefly a poet of humor. Born a Quaker, but now a deeply serious Anglican, he can write of religion with earnest simplicity or with a chuckle ("The old Great Western Railway makes me very sorry for my sins...