Word: gargantuanism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ostensibly the saga of honest vs. ruthless salvage-masters off the treacherous Florida Keys of a century ago, the film is actually just a vehicle for every trick of camera and color, every bluff of gargantuan settings, every cliche of plot and dialogue in DeMille's too familiar repertoire. "Reap the Wild Wind" lacks even the barest spark of originality; it is slow, sticky and indescribably dull. Its possibilities as melodrama are almost completely submerged in an orgy of gross spectacle...
...warm share of Sal's appeal is owing to the man it celebrates: genial, sentimental, gargantuan (300 lb.) Paul Dresser, onetime minstrel, most popular song writer of the '90s, and oldest brother of lugubrious Novelist Theodore Dreiser (who kept the original family name). Dreiser, who wrote the first verse and the chorus of one of his brother's best songs (On the Banks of the Wabash), also wrote the story on which Sal is based...
Fitted like a giant picture puzzle, the world's largest photomural was pasted last week on the east wall of the vast, high-vaulted rotunda of Manhattan's Grand Central Station. When the crew of workmen climbed down from their gargantuan paperhanging job, Grand Central's milling crowds saw a 96-by-118-foot symbolic picture of three things the U.S. is fighting for: the fertile U.S. land, the productiveness of U.S. industry, the future welfare of U.S. children. Its purpose: to encourage travelers and commuters* to buy more U.S. defense bonds and stamps...
...intended as a criticism of our writing, but only as an encyclopedic dictionary for it, the "Oxford Companion to American Literature" is the result of the gargantuan labors of one man--James D. Hart. And although he spent five years on the subject, the book is by no means stolid or ponderous. It contains many relatively obscure and unusual facts which make the book intriguing to while away a few odd minutes as well as to answer some question which arises during other reading. The following entry is typical of many...
Without construction (and maintenance of Army facilities, also headed for the Engineers) the Quartermaster Corps still has its gargantuan job of feeding and clothing an army of 1,572,000. But the loss of construction and maintenance work strikes at an equally important function. Of 7,559 officers now on Quartermaster duty 1,404 are on construction and maintenance duty...