Word: genteel
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...Sale. Brooklyn Heights is one of the few neighborhoods that retains its distinction; its elegant Victorian houses across the bay from Manhattan have attracted many genteel bohemians. On the other hand, the fading Fort Greene Park area nearby recently lost one of its last distinguished citizens when Poetess Marianne Moore, 78, packed her tricorn hat and cape and, after 36 years in Brooklyn, moved to Manhattan. The swamps and old fishing villages in the further reaches have given way to modern subdivisions that most young couples rising in the world regard as mere way stations on the road to suburbia...
...parish with a high sense of social responsibility is the nondenominational Dover Church in a suburb of Boston. Founded in 1762 as a Congregational meeting house, the Dover Church has a quota of New England Brahmins on its membership rolls, and until recently was a classic example of a genteel Christian parish...
...problem of Ivanov's age. Miss Leigh and Miss Hilary try hard in extremely vapid roles. Chekhov was always weak at creating women who were neither old nor eccentric, and at this early stage of his career he was terrible. Miss Leigh might have played Ivanov's genteel, tubercular wife as a little more ill and a little less sweet, but simply coughing louder could not have added depth to a structurally shallow role. Miss Hilary is given two types of lines-one shows that Sasha is strong-willed and the other that she is tender. Miss Hilary plays...
...lousy slob!" says Dilwick the police chief. "Shut up, pig," says Mike Hammer-for him, an exquisitely genteel response. He has already extracted several of Dilwick's teeth with his knuckles, later subjects him to a fatal phlebotomy with a .38-cal. slug. The action in Mickey Spillane's 18th book is embossed with his usual delicate imagery ("The sun was thumbing its nose at the night"), characterization ("On some people skin is skin, but on her it was an invitation to dine"), and grammar ("You lay there, kid"; "I thought I could discern shouts"). As always...
Sylvia Townsend Warner's genteel and wonderfully Victorian prose has always seemed at first sampling to be as innocuous as dandelion wine. Only after the unwary reader is under its influence does he discover that it is laced with gall and witchy nightshade, not to mention a dollop or two of venom...