Word: grimness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This end, like all of the tale, is grim. There is almost no change of tone and no relief in the story, and in this certainly lies much of its oppressiveness. "Our tale begins in darkness and ends in darkness," Prokosch begins, and he pursues the sordid, the unhealthy, and the cruel throughout the book with what appears to be a devotion to some mistaken ideal of honesty. The only other explanation of his over-frequent descriptions of torture and disease would be an intent to please or attract readers through their sheer sadism...
...there are traffic regulations, neither cops nor drivers heed them, nor do the pedestrians, who jaywalk and ignore traffic lights with grim fatalism. There is an incessant blowing of horns, but since all the horns sound alike (apparently having been made in the same factory), the result is a constant and unidentifiable shriek, except for horns on the cars of commissars which have a slightly varied pitch, at the first murmur of which the cops switch the manually operated traffic lights to green. Says U.S. Travel Expert John Stanton, just back from surveying the possibility of Cook's touring...
...Commons, it is often good politics to make a show of courting unpopularity: members are inclined to suspect any attempt to be popular as evidence of bad taste. Last week Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Richard A. ("Rab") Butler remembered good politics as he rose, white-faced and grim, to defend himself against a Labor censure motion condemning him for "incompetence and neglect." The week before, Butler had been scourged by Labor's ambitious Hugh Gaitskell, a former Chancellor himself, who demanded that Butler resign (TIME, Nov. 7). Now Butler set out to defend his emergency tax-raising budget...
...living in the world M. Clair has made for them. After a drunken dinner, for instance, the materialist exudes enthusiasm as he pelts his own portrait with wine glasses. In short Clair has shown that there are pleasanter ways to criticize the advances of modern technology than through the grim didacticism of an Orwellian nightmare...
...being broken at Chicago's Presbyterian McCormick Theological Seminary-so named since 1886 because of the generous endowments of Farm Machinery Maker Cyrus H. McCormick. Last week a theology professor was showing a visitor around. "By the way," he remarked, "we never refer to death as the Grim Reaper around here. It's always the International Harvester...