Word: genteelism
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Life in Mount Allegro was warm, noisy and often violent and profane. Uncle Nino in a fit of temporary madness tried to kill his brother with a flatiron. Children at too early an age learned the meaning and implications of epithets like strafalaria (genteel translation: loose woman). And often, at night, the sky hung like a smoldering sulphurous ceiling above the optical factory that squatted on the banks of the Genesee River. "Underneath it my relatives sang and played guitars and, if they noticed the sky at all, they were reminded of the lemon groves in Sicily. They were stubborn...
...thought she was getting rid of hot loot got her investigated by police last February.) The diva decided to take the animal home, install it in temperature-controlled luxury. For a wild dog the molasses-colored mongrel had an even disposition, a splendid coat. Likely cause for these genteel qualities was the Hempel diet: good beef, carrots, melba toast, cod-liver oil, and sometimes mineral...
America's gayest graveyard began a new broadcast last fortnight (Bible readings) with a new announcer, Scottish-burred Bill Hay, announcer for 16 years of the Amos 'n' Andy program. When Announcer Hay finished his first reading, the story of the Creation, listeners heard a genteel plug for his sponsor, Los Angeles' Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: its wrought-iron gates are bigger than those of Buckingham Palace...
Biographer Forbes (A Mirror for Witches, O Genteel Lady!) is a persistent rummager in regional attics. She sometimes dotes a little too much on research (even noting a change in the size of the armholes of the Governor of Massachusetts' coat). But her life of Paul Revere is: 1) a levelheaded account of Boston's part in the American Revolution; 2) an engaging slide lecture on colonial and early republican life in New England; 3) a lengthy portrait gallery of revolutionists like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, Tory Governor Thomas Hutchinson...
There he sat at table with a broken-down laboratory assistant, a lavender college student, a mousy-genteel kleptomaniac widow, a moth-eaten elocutionist, a stale bibliophile who dismissed all ideas with "forgive my sense of humor"—a gallery which should convince almost everybody that Wells, like Dickens, is no caricaturist of English life but a dispenser of literal and horrifying truth. And there Teddy ran foul of two "overripe virgins," bleached Miss Blame and malapropist Miss Birkenhead, who once spent six months in Paris, calls her Paris sugar daddy her faux...