Word: grimness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such brash behavior provided much-needed levity for most students during an otherwise grim time of year. But in the past several years, Mr. Test's antics seemed to become more annoying than before. Things almost got out of hand last spring when he allegedly made a mistake about the length of an exam and seized a paper from an astonished student, who later threatened to sue him. It is more than a little ironic that Mr. Test lost his job after years of following a set exam format when he refused to switch to a new two-person system...
...sleep. "People usually don't understand the implications of what I'm saying," he insists, "but they are awesome! It's one thing to talk about it; it's another to actually live your life that way. After a while it just gets to be grim. I'm not going to turn around 16 years from now and have my 18-year-old daughter say, 'Hi, Dad, where have you been all my life?' So I'm about to jump off the train. I've got this slim chance right...
Thoughts are errant during exam period. The worlds of fact and doctrine ("Birds cannot actually fly; they are merely prodigious leapers!") collide with the grim fantasies spawned by anxiety ("Perhaps there will be an earthquake and we won't have to take exams"). One sits at a chair and looks out the window. Cambridge does not even have the grace to be covered with snow ("What if Harry Levin actually wrote the plays of Shakespeare?"). Sulphur-laden ice spreads like cancer over the Charles and Roast Beet Specials cost 60. ("If the Atlantic rose a few inches. Boston would...
...same time, they estimate the prospects for a military victory are grim. Many liberal Democrats, moreover, have a strong aversion to military intervention anywhere, and so warn darkly about escalation, mumbling "Another Vietnam" periodically. This stance being inconsistent with funding such evil operations, Democrats have compromised by giving the President less money than he asks for and attaching strings like the Boland Amendment...
...that since progress in art is a myth, painting must perforce go crabwise, with many nostalgic glances backward. Under such a vague rubric, Chia looks a very apposite painter. Granted, neither he nor his fellow transavanguardisti get anywhere near the best German art of this generation, epitomized by the grim, magnificently redemptive visions of Anselm Kiefer, 38. Yet it is better to lack the tragic sense than to fake it. If an artist like Kiefer can uncover the sublimated debris of Nazism, one like Chia can do history as comedy, positing his style on the mannerisms of Italian...