Word: flaccidity
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...audience at Washington's National Press Club, sat the three judges, with their copies of Funk & Wagnalls and Merriam Webster's International, the official sources (where the dictionaries differed, either spelling would do). Professor Harold F. Harding, the veteran "official pronouncer," threw a fast one at Mary: flaccid. Mary muffed the catch, spelled it phlaxid. John got it right, spelled the next word, too, semaphore, to cinch the national spelling championship...
Truckline Cafe wholly muffed a chance to give dramatic, or even melodramatic force to a timely theme. In its casual moments it was flaccid, in its crucial ones unreal. Playwright Anderson's small army of bit parts had an effect of shambling vaudeville. His main story became a hollow study of two people speaking high-busted clichés. Too often, as in the past, he slubbed words into what was neither poetic language nor human speech...
...South; of a heart attack; in Richmond. A spinster who never went to school, she wrote her first story at seven, her 20th and last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning In This Our Life, at 68. Between the two she cultivated muscular ethics, a sinewy style, the flaccid enmity of the old South. To the1 impact of her novels, a critic testified: "Southern romance is dead. Ellen Glasgow has murdered...
...swimming pool at the famed old Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, paralyzed men exercise their flaccid limbs. In the wards, men with legs scarred by vein surgery and men with tantalum plates in their skulls read books on diesel engines, cattle raising, soil conservation. (They cheerfully show their wounds to anyone willing to look.) In the recreation hall, some of the wounded watch the Army training film Baptism of Fire and hear the day's war news. A man in the occupational-therapy department is absorbed in making a set of four-leaf-clover buttons of clay...
...staffers generally cheered the Evans departure, observed that when the Sun had been flaccid and ineffective it had been so because Publisher Evans thought it smart business to be that...