Word: harmless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...little spoof of cowboy pictures. Jack Carson plays the sow-bellied sheriff, Rosemary Clooney the lady known as Cal. Guy Mitchell is the man on the white horse, Gene Barry is the hombre on the black. Pat Crowley wears the gingham and blinks purty-like. There are a few harmless songs, some lively skedaddling by the dancers, and everybody seems to be enjoying himself. An O.K. picture, but it helps to be colorblind...
...professor who does not mind getting from his window cleaner a note like this: "The windows have been cleaned Wed. 12:30 p.m. Your maid was their to veryfey the statement." That sort of thing, says Barzun in the Atlantic Monthly, may be bad writing, but it is nevertheless harmless. The real danger to language "does not come from such trifles. It comes rather from the college-bred millions who . . . circulate the prevailing mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax that passes for prose." Barzun calls this "the infinite duplication of dufferism...
...crunched in the innards of a factory machine. Light as a feather, and funny, is John Collier's The Bottle Party, which is not ghostly at all but deals with the imps which lie imprisoned in bottles crying, "Let me out! Do let me out! . . . I'm harmless. Please...
...crackling, reportorial prose, the book describes "quiet, religious" George DuPre, a Canadian who entered British Intelligence early in World War II and prepared for a strange mission. For nine months he was trained to behave like "the village halfwit" so that he could play the part of a harmless, moronic French garage mechanic after he was dropped behind the German lines. The book told how DuPre helped smuggle Allied flyers out of enemy territory until the Gestapo picked him up. The Nazis tortured him with a sulphuric-acid enema, poured boiling water into his clamped-open mouth, squashed his finger...
...Roman Catholic archdiocese of Newark: "It is not gambling but the abuse of gambling that involves an immoral act . . ." Said Father Thomas J. Conroy of St. Cecilia's Church in Kearny: "A fight should be waged against such sins as birth control, divorce and euthanasia, not against the harmless practice, engaged in by older people, mostly women, of putting five little squares in a row on a card...