Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...circumstances were similar: the White House was embroiled in scandal and a presidency tottered on the brink of disaster. At the Senate Watergate Committee hearings during the summer of 1973, an earnest Republican lawmaker from Tennessee became famous when he framed the essential question concerning Richard Nixon: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" The answer led to Nixon's downfall...
...tour of duty, some essential mental functions are decidedly absent, as in, "lights on, nobody home." Having gotten a job as a cab driver, Travis has ample opportunity to observe the filth (animate and inanimate) that permanently infests New York City. Confronted with a grimy and desperate reality, the earnest hack prophesies: "Some day a good rain's gonna come wash the shit from these streets...
...divide neatly into two mutually exclusive categories: the shows kids watch and the shows they ought to watch. In the first group are the platoons of super-heroes, Smurfs and toy-store transplants that fill the dial on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons. In the second are those earnest after-school specials and occasional PBS offerings praised by critics and parents but seldom watched by more than a fraction of the youngsters who crowd in front of the set for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Square One TV, the new PBS mathematics series produced by the Children...
Occasionally, the earnest musical-comedy style of the singing and dancing threatens to overwhelm the material, and a purist friend tells me that the house pianist was way off throughout. So, purists take note. For the rest of us it's a cast of dreamboats and high-power honeys singin' the kind of songs that heaven sings when its feelin' blue. So to speak...
MARILYN: NORMA JEANE, which is half Steinem's text and half photographs by George Barris, is both an earnest revisionist history and a coffee-table decoration wrapped in one glossy volume. Steinem attempts to debunk the endless, and accumulating, Marilyn myths and cast Monroe in a role more realistic than diamond-digger Lorelei Lee could ever...