Word: genteel
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...coordinated the search for two downed American aviators and pressed the case for fighter escort to accompany continuing U.S. reconnaissance flights over the Plain of Jars. The ambassador stopped by a cocktail party to talk with a rightist leader, then dropped in on Premier Souvanna Phouma for a little genteel arm twisting...
...might be assumed, therefore, that his prizewinning Selected Poems (Knopf; $4) could not be usefully perused without benefit of The Golden Bough, Kierkegaard, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Not so. Many of Ran som's gentle verses deal in genteel terms with subjects easily apprehended by the lingering tea-and-antimacassar set in Ransom's own home town of Pulaski, Tenn. His topics run to ceremonious family occasions, chivalric legends, brief encounters between might-have-been lovers, small social events, the death of a boy, even the demise of a child...
...such linguistic collisions did not deter a genteel, bejeweled audience from giving Mahagonny a 30-minute ovation, despite the opera's fiercely stated argument that all wealth is wicked. "Rich Italians now consider it very smart and refined to like Brecht and Weill," one critic humphed, and another suggested that all the fat cats clapped only to confuse spies from the tax collector's office. But the curtain calls had nothing to do with socialist realism. Instead, they were a tribute to Gloria Davy and Gloria Lane, two American singers who made Mahagonny a triumph in any tongue...
...WAPSHOT SCANDAL, by John Cheever. In chronicling the calamitous entry of the genteel Wapshot family into the 20th century's mobile society, Novelist Cheever again displays his unique perspective on contemporary American life...
...Thelonious," he recalls, "but they used to call me 'Monkey,' and you know what a drag that was." His father returned to the South alone to recover from a long illness, leaving Monk's mother, a sternly correct civil servant, to work hard to give her three children a genteel polish. At eleven, Thelonious began weekly piano lessons at 75¢ an hour...