Word: genteel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...background of many of these students has been a surprise to the college. Ada Administrator Eleanor Rothman recalls that when the program was first proposed, the faculty expected to receive genteel inquiries from well-to-do women yearning to complete their degrees. Instead, applications poured in from clerks, secretaries, farmers, nurses and switchboard operators. One woman, who worked as an apple picker, wrote in her application: "I am ready to go to school because I need to." Another Ada, Barbara Rosenheck, 46, the widowed mother of four, now spending part of the week in a Smith dormitory, feels...
...reptiles themselves. In the 19th century, Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the leading collectors in the U.S., feuded so bitterly over fossil sites in the badlands of Wyoming that their teams came close to combat. Today the skirmishing is more genteel, although no less forceful. Some experts, for example, have contended vigorously that dinosaurs must have been warm-blooded, like mammals and birds, in order to have mustered the internal heat, or energy, for an active, land-based life. Colbert disagrees. He explains that their bulk alone would have enabled large dinosaurs...
...eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began...
...years the taxicab service at the Jidda international airport belied the fact that the city is a booming Saudi Arabian business center. The taxis, often dirty, run down and operated by quarrelsome drivers, gave travelers a poor introduction to the country. Now they have a more genteel alternative, thanks to Jidda Businessman Ibrahim Khonkar. He decided that what Jidda needed was a fleet of London taxis, those boxy, roomy cabs that have become something of a movable landmark in Britain...
Percy is aware that this forbidding subject requires a light touch. In fact, most readers know the author as the genteel Louisianian who wrote such mournfully charming novels as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins. But there is also Percy the Dixie Kierkegaard who wrote The Message in the Bottle. That 1975 collection of essays attempted to relieve the ache of self-estrangement by arguing that humankind was the glory of the universe because it was the only known species that used language (as distinguished from the intelligent communication of chimps and dolphins...