Word: girlish
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...happens to be a rich criminal, a Mafia type, life in some prisons can be easy. Ill-paid "hacks" (guards) may sell him anything from smuggled heroin to a girlish cellmate. More often...
...witness is girlish, her blonde hair in pigtails, a small, soft figure on the stand. She says...
...suggestion that she might be involved in scandal would have appalled Mary Jo Kopechne. Then it might have amused her, for she was often kidded for not being a swinger. Girlish and gung-ho, she led a life that revolved around the Catholic Church, politics and the Kennedy family. Mary Jo, as everyone who knew her agreed last week, was the girl next door, or perhaps the tomboy, who played catcher on the office softball team. When she took her first Capitol Hill job in 1963, working for Florida's Senator George Smathers, there was a standing joke that only...
...pills to wake her up, pills to help keep her weight down. Eleven years, two husbands, and 20 movies (including the Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney, Meet Me in St. Louis and Easter Parade) after making Oz, she had established herself as the best of a bevy of girlish filmland warblers that included Gloria Jean, Deanna Durbin and Jane Powell. But she could no longer handle the pressure of stardom. She began showing up for work late or sick, then did not show up at all. She was suspended once, twice, and finally, in 1950, fired for good...
Straining for nuance distorts her prose. Unstrained, it moves in clear, strong sentences. Speaking of a man to whom education comes hard, she writes: "For a while he dragged each idea up the stairs like a heavy body." Listening for portents, she becomes girlish, sibylline, addicted to dashes and italics: "Consciousness, when first frightened into being, wants all the more to live by the fencepost and the stone. The human part is in speaking of it at all. Where I might have to lie. But I could have told anyone at once, like a shot, what I was afraid...