Word: gruff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...minutes, the prisoner protested his innocence. But five high-ranking officers, conducting Canada's first war-crimes trial (TIME, Dec. 31), needed only half an hour to reach a verdict. Up rose tight-lipped Major General Harry W. Foster to read out the sentence in a gruff, soldierly voice. In more subdued tones, an American interpreter translated it for the prisoner. As the import of the words became clear, Kurt Meyer turned beet-red: for responsibility in the killing of 18 Canadian prisoners of war, death by a firing squad...
Only the practical G.B.S. would think of raising an Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter by correcting her gutturals. Only the paradoxical G.B.S. would suggest how much more insecure she is when bediamonded than when she was bedraggled. Only the perverse G.B.S. would select a gruff, self-centered, confirmed-bachelor of a phonetics professor for a fairy prince. But even Shaw leaves the door open for a fairy-tale ending...
...Gianninis, not related, helped bring the crisis to a head. In Milan, Editor Guglielmo Giannini's Uomo Qualunque (TIME, Nov. 26) insistently demanded a new government of nonpoliticians. In Rome, gruff U.S. Banker Amadeo Peter Giannini of California's Bank of America answered a Parri Government request for credits with "Italy's present precarious situation does not permit the safe investment of capital. . . . Without a strong government you will be unable to prevent rioting...
...weeks ago in San Francisco, gruff, bearish Amadeo Peter Giannini, 75, "retired" boss of the Bank of America, was attending a board meeting. As Senior Vice Chairman Francis Shaw Baer droned through figures describing the bank's condition, old "A.P." fidgeted like a school boy with two fingers raised. Suddenly he jumped up, pounded the table and roared: "For God's sake, Franny, give 'em the big news...
...World War I, when the British did not dragoon their scientists as sternly as in this one, somebody asked gruff Sir Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford) if he would please stop puttering with the atom and work full time on antisubmarine devices. Rutherford answered, in effect: Gentlemen, I am trying to split the atom. If I succeed, it will be more important than...