Word: humbler
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...fact, She Stoops To Conquer is clearly the work of a critic: for it is an elaborate construction designed to poke fun at middle-class "uplifting" comedy and celebrate the comic virtues of members of the "humbler stations." Goldsmith turns a worthy squire's home into an inn, and makes the "inn-keeper's" daughter impersonate a bar maid in order to win a shy suitor. (This gentleman, you see, is comfortable not with "women or reputation and virtue," but only in the company of "creatures of another stamp.") Goldsmith's point is that in order to conquer--or rather...
Geneva has many fine houses with many fine rooms, but the U.S. diplomats who travel to the city for those endless international conferences must find humbler lodgings in the overcrowded hotels. Hearing of the diplomats' lot from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Boston Socialite Mrs. Katharine McCormick, 89, widow of an heir to the International Harvester farm machine fortune, came to the rescue with a generous donation: her 238-year-old, $500,000 chateau in the nearby village of Prangins. The 40-room mansion will be renovated by the U.S. Government and will become the residence of United States...
...centuries, a jumping ritual known as the zaar has been used to drive away djinn, or evil spirits, by Egyptian witch doctors. At a typical zaar, affluent customers are ordered to bring such items as sheep and goats for sacrifices; humbler offerings of fish and fowl may be demanded of the poor, but the witch doctors always come out ahead. After the djinn-soaked customer is isolated for a week, the witch doctor bursts into his room with a band composed of drum-beaters and female vocalists whose job is to shriek. The zaar goes...
Syndicated Columnist Inez Robb has been content to leave such lofty matters as "world peace, the Good Neighbor policy, nuclear supremacy and the stabilization of the dollar" to colleagues of a more cosmic stripe. Mrs. Robb usually sights in on humbler game: highway billboards, women in slacks, unhygienic rest rooms...
Avenues, colonnades, and shops were part of a rebuilding project begun about 400 A.D. Disaster struck this sumptuous quarter of the city some 200 years later when Persian invaders overran Sardis. Byzantine engineers later levelled the toppled columns, walls and other debris and on top laid a much humbler cobble-paved road...