Word: faint
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Ronald Reagan visited Illinois two weeks ago, he appeared to damn Thompson with slightly faint praise. "I've always been confident of the integrity of your Governor," said the President. "I would be very surprised if he did anything that could be called malfeasance." But one Thompson aide conceded that although the Governor "has not done anything illegal," the accusations of impropriety were damaging "especially when tied to a rotten economy," So Stevenson continues to gain despite his languid campaigning style. The Democrat's coffers, which a few months ago held less than...
Right away on the river, he heard a mating snlpe flinging itself about the sky in order to impress its female, with a faint laughing ululation such as children make when hooting with their hands in front of their mouths. He saw some sandpipers, or "teeter-tails," tipping their tails as they searched for invertebrates. A gray marsh hawk seized a dazed and chilly frog before his eyes, and half a dozen geese were still dawdling south of their nesting ground in passionate but wary pairs...
Inside the spa building, in a small windowless room, an uptight, burned-out, more-fat-than-fit East Coast Type A female is submitting to an herbal wrap. A cup of alfalfa-mint tea precedes mummification. She sweats to the faint chimes of "music to relax and meditate by." The East Coast Type A resents being told to relax. The ranch's resident psychotherapist, Richard ("Bud") Murphy, will later tell her, "Many people come here seeking withdrawal from something-food, a bad marriage, personal problems, smoking-but they feel ambivalent and resist change...
...right decision. Waugh, one of the great prose craftsmen of the 20th century, must have realized that his 14-year-old Charles was a faint carbon copy of his public school self. Ryder attends "Spierpoint" just after World War I; Waugh went to Lancing at the same time. Details and dialogue are loosely transplanted from the author's diaries. Like Waugh, young Ryder exhibits a monkish passion for drawing and illuminated texts. Unlike the grave, sentimental narrator of Brideshead, Charles the teen-ager can sound as curmudgeonly as his middle-aged maker: "I think the invention of movable type...
...depcit an allegorical subject. Moonlight strikes a tomb, a ruined cathedral looms in the background, dead beeches litter the foreground, shrouded women walk among the graves, all of which suggests the hopeless mortality of man and his inevitable doom. But Ruisdael is not entirely morbid, and he inclines a faint but perceptible rainbow on the horizon--a glimmer of hope and he possibility of rebirth...