Word: humorlessly
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Seen through the eyes of Gussie Millinder, a humorless but perceptive old maid, the family's degeneration is pathetic. Mean little descriptions of poor Newport hostesses whose husbands had to make do with fortunes of only $1,000,000 give the neat, well-mannered prose an occasional touch of irony. But young debutantes who sugar their very small talk with references to Louis XI (not XIII or XIV), and butler who tell dinner guests when their hostes wants them to switch conversational part ners, all lend a persistent air of unreality almost as if the author were intent...
...Eton-collared little Lord Fauntleroys of late 19th century America against the Huckleberry Finn of then and all time. Like a big frog always about to make a prizewinning jump, Sam Clemens stood out against his background: as a young man with lean cheeks, darkish hair and misleadingly humorless eyes, or as a snow-headed Connecticut Yankee, strutting in the cap and gown he had worn when Oxford University conferred upon him a Litt. D.: "I like the degree-but I'm crazy about the clothes...
...simple decree-with no evidence needed. In the first month after he took over last December, stubby, handsome Frank Erasmus issued banning orders on eight people, an alltime record. And when last week the government decided to outlaw the only two African organizations of any substance, it was stiff, humorless Erasmus who stood in Parliament to introduce the legislation. The son of a Boer farmer, Erasmus was trained for the law, but plunged into Afrikaner politics at 30, attaching himself to a then obscure leader named Daniel...
LADY L., by Remain Gary. A relatively slight and urbane book, but one that the year needed. The British lady turns out to be a reformed French prostitute, and her old anarchist lover is cast as Author Gary's target: a handsome, humorless fellow so bent on saving humanity that he forgets the nature of humans and their occasional indisposition to be saved...
Further, while "antiseptic and astringent criticism of the form of Christian affirmation" leads to clarification, it also brings about a "humorless constriction of the very terms it brings under analysis." In short, said Sittler, the context of confirmation is the "massive and organic story of man--in his analysis and anguish, his vision and his dread, his lusts, longings, loves, and loneliness...