Word: gravamen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dukakis' vectors point downward, as if gravity were pressing on him especially hard. Even the words that leave his lips seem to have weights on them. When he says, as he often does in a speech, "My friends," the expression carries a curious gravamen of reproof or irony -- but no warmth. His speeches, however, have much of his body's compactness and concision and a certain driving force about them...
...time. Rader's reminiscences are if anything raunchier and more explicit than Williams' own, and without footnotes or explanation of sources, some of his anecdotes about the peccadilloes of the famous seem too bad to be true. Beguiling as gossip, Rader's book has none of the inclusiveness or gravamen of Spoto's tome. But it has one crucial advantage: Rader genuinely liked Williams, and the reader can understand...
...your presentment you have set forth more or less definitely a series of grievances, the gravamen of which is that the present executive authority of the islands, designated by the United States Government, is in your opinion, out of sympathy with the reasonable national aspirations of the Filipino people...
...finicky--they want white-collar jobs and don't care for the sweat and the muck that are not dissociable with some kinds of hard work. Clerical employment appears congenial to them; the grind and the grief of mechanical engineering does not. At the bottom of Mr. Edison's gravamen against the collegian is his disinclination to work. He says a man is set for life at twenty-one, and if he is a dullard then, a dullard he will remain to the end of his days...
| 1 |