Word: genteelness
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Orwell looked back harshly on the "shabby genteel" class inhabited by his parents and their friends: "Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances." Unlike most who rebel from the worlds of their childhood, Eric became hypercritical of himself as well; his behavior during his early years, his adult memories of this period, both convey the peculiar sense that he considered himself not good enough for a style of life he disliked. The Blairs kept up appearances by enrolling their son, at reduced tuition, in St. Cyprian's, an institution that rigorously prepared boys for the great...
...background of many of these students has been a surprise to the college. Ada Administrator Eleanor Rothman recalls that when the program was first proposed, the faculty expected to receive genteel inquiries from well-to-do women yearning to complete their degrees. Instead, applications poured in from clerks, secretaries, farmers, nurses and switchboard operators. One woman, who worked as an apple picker, wrote in her application: "I am ready to go to school because I need to." Another Ada, Barbara Rosenheck, 46, the widowed mother of four, now spending part of the week in a Smith dormitory, feels...
...reptiles themselves. In the 19th century, Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the leading collectors in the U.S., feuded so bitterly over fossil sites in the badlands of Wyoming that their teams came close to combat. Today the skirmishing is more genteel, although no less forceful. Some experts, for example, have contended vigorously that dinosaurs must have been warm-blooded, like mammals and birds, in order to have mustered the internal heat, or energy, for an active, land-based life. Colbert disagrees. He explains that their bulk alone would have enabled large dinosaurs...
...eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began...
...years the taxicab service at the Jidda international airport belied the fact that the city is a booming Saudi Arabian business center. The taxis, often dirty, run down and operated by quarrelsome drivers, gave travelers a poor introduction to the country. Now they have a more genteel alternative, thanks to Jidda Businessman Ibrahim Khonkar. He decided that what Jidda needed was a fleet of London taxis, those boxy, roomy cabs that have become something of a movable landmark in Britain...