Word: humorlessness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Because grim, humorless Senator William Henry ("Mac") McMaster, insurgent Republican up for reelection, loves the Hoover Administration no more than does lean-faced, witty Governor William John Bulow, his Democratic senatorial opponent, South Dakota this year is a political battlefield practically barren of national issues. However Nominee Bulow's blunt comedy-Will Rogers once called him "funnier than I am"-has saved their campaign from stagnation. Last week he declared: "They ain't any great issues out here, I guess. Mac's got a job and I want it." Nominee Bulow is famed for his tobacco chewing...
Included in the batch of letters are all the familiar specimens of newspaper correspondence; there are the Legion boys themselves who start off with the customary cracks at the "deah old Harvard Ladies," and then continue in an equally intelligent vein; and there are the humorless, but conscientious Harvard alumni who write in and deplore the Crimson's "hasty and unwise policy;" still others hold "older men," viz., the board of directors, responsible; and a few strike out boldly in their wholehearted approval...
...humorless, cranky old maid was Emily Dickinson. Hers was feminine intelligence at its keenest, and many a masculine ponderosity drew her inner smile. Said she: "I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears." Unable to discover the Devil, she concluded: "He must be making war on some other nation." Her definition of poetry is famed among present-day poets: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head...
When the Cherry Sisters came to town, 30 years ago, loud was the rejoicing in poolrooms. The Cherry Sisters were blowsy, humorless young actresses who sang sentimental ballads completely off key, in dead earnestness. They appeared behind a serviceable net that covered the stage, and it was entirely au fait for the audience to hurl apples, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, other ingredients of a typical New England boiled dinner, throughout the Cherry Sisters appearance. In every town that the Cherry Sisters played, it was an invariable custom for the editor of the local paper to review their act with a column...