Word: genteelness
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...touched down in Vilnius the dignified statesman, expecting to rely on his charm and diplomatic skills to work out a compromise. But when the first cry of Samostoyatelnost! -- independence -- sounded from the Lithuanian crowd, Mikhail Gorbachev rapidly abandoned the strategies of genteel diplomacy and adopted the tactics of a ward politician bent on maintaining his lock on a balking constituency. "Independence?" he shouted above the insistent cries. "Let's have it. At the workplace. In cities. Republics. But together...
Investors agreed. They flocked to place money with the brothers, who had earned a reputation for creativity and bareknuckle competitiveness in the genteel British ad market. The Saatchis went on a billion-dollar spree that sparked panic on then complacent Madison Avenue and helped fuel a merger frenzy as other agencies joined forces to stay in the game. Meanwhile the brothers bought and bought. Among the dozens of U.S. firms they scooped up were top names like Compton Communications (purchased in 1982 for $55 million), Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (1986, $75 million) and Backer & Spielvogel (1986, $100 million...
Such a metaphor is available in Driving Miss Daisy. If you look hard, you can find in this account of the 25-year relationship between Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a genteel Southern, Jewish matriarch, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), a microcosmic study of changing racial attitudes in a crucial time and place (Atlanta, circa 1948-73). What you will not find in this marvelously understated movie is overtly inspirational comments on that subject, broad sentimentality or the slightest pomposity about its own mission. In other words, Alfred Uhry's adaptation of his Pulitzer-prizewinning play aspires more...
...Glemp episode is a reminder of the genteel anti-Semitism that has always been just below the surface and, in the current, more permissive climate, can come poking through," says Charles Gati, an expert on Eastern Europe at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Gati has found thinly disguised Jew baiting back in fashion in his native Hungary. One of the top-ranked soccer teams, MTK, was heavily financed by Jews in the 1930s before more than half of the Jewish community was murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian offshoot, the Arrow Cross Party. Now, half a century later...
...with a Virginia political trailblazer named Douglas Wilder. Back in 1975, when Wilder was the only black in the state senate (and the first since 1890), he gave voice to his overarching aspirations, a notion of empowerment far beyond what seemed plausible amid the genteel conservatism of the Old Dominion. "If people will elect you Lieutenant Governor," Wilder predicted with startling prescience, "they'll elect you Governor. I would think it would be an interesting test somewhere along the line for a black to run for one of those positions so as to put prejudice right on the line...