Word: genteel
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...government granted a reprieve: a piddling 120 tons, enough for two or three days. This week, another skimpy allotment would probably be doled out. Perhaps the Peron regime felt that, in killing off an institution that the outside world had learned to honor, slow starvation might seem more genteel than outright strangulation...
...which can be said in poetic drama that can't be said in poetic drama that can't be said in the ordinary speech of prose drama." That he is right, there can be no argument. But while the dialogue of "The Cocktail Party" has wit, intelligence, and a genteel flow and rhythm-all of which are certainly desirable in verse drama-one is not altogether sure that what Mr. Eliot has to say could not just as well have been said in prose. None of the poetry of "The Cocktail Party" really illuminates any untapped wells of thought...
...light for football, Sherman made the fencing team, was pronounced by the Lucky Bag "supreme as a fusser [a genteel wolf] and yard reptile [a midshipman who squires the daughters of Annapolis captains and admirals]." He was also something of a teacher's pet. When a classmate asked a difficult question, the instructor would have Sherman stand up and reel off the answer. Sherman stood second in the wartime Class of 1918, which graduated a year ahead of its time. As the new ensign hurried off to war, the Lucky Bag summarized: "Forrest Percival has been the object...
...Tiger in the Garden" follows the Richardson children, Caroline, Percy, and Byron, from their genteel childhood before World War I, through Caroline's scandalous elopement with Joe Conway, a man of no social standing with whom all women want to sleep: through Percy's drunkenness, debauchery, homosexuality, and early death. Conway, at first scorned by his in-laws, makes a fortune when oil is discovered in the old cotton fields, and periodically escapes the sterile Richardsons by running off to New Orleans with a lady of fashion and culture...
Passes at Horace. The Peabody girls were very poor and very genteel. Mother Peabody held her head high because her family had once been rich, though now she had to roll back the parlor rug and teach the neighbors' children when she wasn't brought to bed with her own (she also bore three sons and another daughter who died in infancy). Father Nathaniel was a dentist, a kindly potterer and whittler who never learned how to stand up to his energetic womenfolk. By any standards of the day, his daughters made their marks...