Word: humorlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...impressions into one of his novelistic moral conundrums. The attempt of the U.S. to find what he calls a "Third Force" between French colonialism and military Communism, is personified in Alden Pyle, member of a U.S. economic mission. He is the "quiet American"-a Harvard man, young, innocent, good, humorless, a Unitarian. He speaks in the hortatory Emily Post style which all British novelists since Max Beerbohm seem to think is the native speech of proper Bostonians. He eats "Vit-Health" sandwich-spread that his mother sends him. He is courageous and dedicated, but his eager virtue turns into fumbling...
...reading is humorless and the music is indifferent, but cat lovers are lapping...
...city schools. It might better have been applied to both Mrs. Luce's decision to boycott the film Blackboard Jungle, or TIME'S defense of her act. Rather than be shocked ai American school conditions, be they typical or not, Europeans must have wondered at a humorless Government always ready to trumpet its virtues but equally ready with a whitewash brush for its vices...
Despite such defects, the book is highly useful. It will suggest to the reader that the language of Soviet bureaucracy is simply the herd noise of a pack of exceedingly dull and humorless rogues. It also shows that international Communism has created a linguistic apparatus for a general attack on the whole logical structure of the Western mind-an attack which does not cease when Moscow talks peace...
Dreyfus was a brilliant, studious artillery officer who ate, slept and dreamed the army. But in a French officers' club of those days, he had two marks against him: he was stiff, studious and humorless, and he was a Jew. He refused to be cowed by the anti-Semitism of the day, through sheer ability became the first Jewish officer to be appointed to the French general staff. Suddenly, on Oct. 15, 1894, he was ordered to report to the office of the chief of staff. There a Major du Paty de Clam dictated a letter filled with secrets...