Word: genteel
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...feeling for family -- genteel or belligerent, sickening and sustaining -- is crucial to DeVito, born 41 years ago in Asbury Park, N.J. "My father was a tough man with a great deal of warmth," he says. "It made for a mixed bag of emotions; you never knew when it would explode. He owned a candy store, then a dry cleaner's, then a pool hall. In the pool hall, I'd put tips on the cues, clean the tables and hang out. It was my day-care center. At home I was spoiled by my mom and her millions of girlfriends...
...song-and-dance acts are replaced by a Passion play. In a salon of the 500- room hotel, blue-haired grannies sip tea (no alcohol is served) as a harpist plays nearby. "Jim Bakker grew up and asked, 'Why can't everything be nice?' " reports Aide Richard Dortch. The genteel slickness of Heritage USA is Bakker's answer to that question: the triumph of born-again nice...
Black Mask's early contributors rejected the class-conscious plots and genteel style of the British school of crime writing. "Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it," said Chandler, who found the details of British mysteries as unexciting as "spillikins in the parlor." Hammett's early hero, the Continental Op, is a nameless abstraction of the hard-boiled ethic: "I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can." His connection...
...with the best beluga caviar and finest Scotch smoked salmon or reduced to the simplest school-lunch-box peanut-butter-and-jelly combination or even a "Fluffernutter" (peanut butter with Marshmallow Fluff, the rage with the kindergarten set). Sandwiches may be dainty, crustless cucumber-and-watercress creations for genteel tea parties or towering copies of the Dagwood, the raid-the-refrigerator construction invented by Blondie's husband Dagwood Bumstead. Determined to add as much as possible to his nocturnal feast, he was known to include sardines...
While fighting off lawsuits from the outside, accountants are also facing increasingly intense competition within their industry. Reason: merger mania has shrunk the pool of potential clients for major accounting firms. As a result, the genteel rules that once governed C.P.A. competition have gone by the boards. Says Jerome Lipman, head of his own Chicago accounting firm: "In the past, the theory was that if you had your green eyeshade on and worked at your desk, you'd get more business. That's not true anymore. You have to aggressively go after it now." Client stealing has become more common...