Word: halcyon
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Despite his eccentricities, Sinclair was a quiet, gentle man who claimed an unexceptionable pantheon of heroes: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. Critic Alfred Kazin called his special quality "combative innocence." Sinclair, wrote Kazin, represented "one of the last ties we have with that halcyon day when Marxists still sounded like Methodists...
...rosy-visioned device most recently revived by Richard Nixon at Miami Beach. An early halcyon-evoker was Robert G. Ingersoll, who orated in 1876 on behalf of James G. Blaine: "I see our country filled with happy homes . . . I see a world without a slave." F.D.R., in 1940: "I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime . . . I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people." Adlai Stevenson, in 1952: "I see an America where no man fears to think as he pleases, or say what he thinks...
...promoting the low-priced ($2,073) Rambler-along with a separate $300,000 splash of ads plugging the company's size and zest-American was obviously trying to regain the image of its halcyon days. Back in the '50s, then-President George Romney captured most of the U.S. market for compacts with his hoots at larger models as "gas-guzzling dinosaurs." Though American followed along with other models (Ambassador, Marlin) when car buyers' taste returned to the larger size, and even stretched the length and breadth of some Ramblers, its share of U.S. auto sales steadily slipped...
...Fulbright sent down encouraging notes. Senator Wayne Morse amicably asked just the right leading questions and agreed enthusiastically with nearly everything the star witness said. To Secretary of State Dean Rusk, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it must have seemed like a remembrance of days past-those halcyon, pre-Viet Nam days when he could be sure that he had a solid majority of the committee behind him. The matter under discussion, a consular treaty with the Soviet Union, might itself have been the cause of some nostalgia, for it has been waiting a long time for ratification...
Never a Cipher. In the halcyon 1930s, Geoffrey Parsons was the city's most influential editorial writer; Stanley Woodward ran the best sports page in the business. The city editor was that celebrated Texan Stanley Walker, whom many consider the alltime champion in that trade. Walker issued just two ukases: "Do not betray a confidence, and do not knife a comrade." But he could make some pointed suggestions. A correspondent whose copy lacked enough punctuation once received a full typed page of commas. And in his book, City Editor, Walker wrote, "Pick adjectives as you would pick a diamond...