Word: humdrums
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...honor code that has become so important to West Point -and the U.S. Army-began under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, superintendent from 1817 to 1833. A Dartmouth man with a backbone of iron, Thayer changed West Point from a humdrum school for the sons of wealthy families into a first-class engineering institution. After studying European military systems, he also imposed on the cadets a kind of Prussian discipline that lingers today. Thayer had strict rules against lying and stealing, and what was called "irregular or immoral practices...
...dutifully investigated women's liberation groups and decided to keep up the surveillance, even though they appeared to be concerned just with freeing "women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother." In 1941, the FBI began an intensive probe of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after 15 black mess stewards in the Navy protested against racial discrimination. For 25 years, the bureau hunted for signs of Communist influence in the N.A.A.C.P., although a report in the first year of the investigation said the organization had a "strong tendency" to "steer clear...
...spite of Mazursky's apparent intention, Sarah emerges as the emotional center of the film. In her dissatisfaction with Larry and her resentment of her own humdrum life, Ellen Greene's Sarah seems more honest than the rest, a woman hopelessly caught in the emage of an era. Her final rejection of Larry tips the balance against him, leaving him free to take one last, self-conscious look at his Brooklyn tenements before fading out into the image of the sun in the west...
...must protest the decision to have Camillo substitute the humdrum word "undress" in discase thee instantly." "Discase " is a gem of a word (Shakespeare would use it again in The Tempest). Once you start this tinkering, where do you stop? The Winter's Tale has quite a number of obsolete or arcane terms that occur nowhere of obsolete or arcane terms that occur nowhere else in Shakespeare--such as neb, hoxes, callet, losel, pugging, dibble, caddises, barne, and pettitoes. Are these to be thrown out too? Let audiences do their homework, or suffer the consequences. (Some years back, Robert Graves...
...into a tornado, he has been scared. "It was the most frightening thing that ever happened to me," he confided last week to the London Daily Mail, adding that the pilot had not seen such weather in 26 years. Since then Getty has had to rely on such humdrum transport as yachts, private railroad cars and limousines. But safety can be monotonous, and when Getty decided to move permanently from England to his Malibu, Calif., estate this spring, he took his life in his hands. "I will go on a jumbo," he said with bravado, "and I shall probably treat...