Word: genteelness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hotel seems unfixed in time as well as place. Instead of a history it has a tradition of sumptuous meals, sleigh rides, and genteel conversation. The guests, too, seem determined to erase their pasts, or at least alter them so as to erase some present pain. The deepest, darkest secret is Mrs. Cendrars', it seems, and the revelations in the dessert room all might be part of a nightmare dreamed by her, growing from her secret...
...that they are powerless in our society, the exceptions to a new set of rules. That such overt, virulent racism today stands out serves as a reminder of the strides America has made in race relations. The racism that hinders the nation's minorities today is of a more genteel nature...
...sources, Hughes punctures many of the myths about the new arrivals and how they fared. Except for Irish political dissidents, for whom Australia was the "official Siberia," the typical transportee was apt to be a small-time thief with at least one previous conviction. Those sent over for more genteel crimes inevitably felt superior to the cruder types, and the colony's earliest bureaucracy had the distinction of being "almost wholly made up of forgers...
...bitchery ("She was known all over Copiah County as cheap Christmas trash"), the climactic conciliations -- all of which seemed fresh, if not downright impudent onstage -- play smug and stilted on the big screen? Or has something precious been lost? When does a faithful, almost literal adaptation turn into a genteel lynching of its source...
Mozart once wrote that he composed music as effortlessly as a cow urinates. Chekhov was more genteel about his own fluency. "I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny," he says, and elsewhere picks up an ashtray and offers to have a story about it ready for the next day. Editors of Russia's literary journals appreciated this facility and Chekhov's acceptance of editing to satisfy Czar Alexander III's censors...