Word: humorlessness
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...Army came to a clouded end because of a rancorous quarrel over a finicky point of military etiquette. As professor at Virginia Military Institute, where he taught optics and astronomy, Jackson was alternately laughed at and hated by his students. His own Confederate staff officers raged at his humorless and dictatorial manner. Yet what friends he made stayed his friends forever...
...willing to answer only ten of them. (Among the many subjects he declined to discuss: U.S. prisoners in China, Titoism, Peking's offer of a governmental post to Chiang Kai-shek.) Murrow & Co., and viewers as well, were fortunate that Chou did not answer more. He sat, solemn, humorless and tired-looking, acting like a man who was far from being his own master. Though he understands English well, Chou insisted on reading his answers in mechanical Chinese for an interpreter to translate. The answers themselves were composed so clumsily and delivered so dispiritedly that the onlooker could wonder...
...Deal. The Maulas who inhabit Monsarrat's island are a grave, long-winded, humorless people, including urbanized zoot-suiters down at the port and taboo-ridden jungle men up north. The older Maulas are courteous and profoundly conservative-content with the hope that their chief will one day lead them to a seat in the commodious kraal of the British Commonwealth. The chief is 22-year-old Dinamaula; seven years of English schools, an Oxford law degree and the flattering attention of progressive girls...
...have spent apart. Gerald's only daughter has married a slack-spirited intellectual snob. His younger son is a BBC television personality whose public pitch is heart-tugging interviews with the wronged; privately, he is enamored of a blackmailing, homosexual spiv. Gerald's elder son is a humorless business tycoon who keeps two sets of emotional books: in one, a grim and proper wife; in the other, a toothsome, pseudo-bohemian mistress. This illicit affair is almost a parody...
Helen is a beautiful, poised, glamorous costume designer, aged 35 (no change in 23 years). She is a widow, but not even her scriptwriters know who her husband was, or what ever became of him. Helen never tells. She is invincibly pure, relentlessly humorless (because her fans want heartthrobs, not laughs). Once, seven years ago, she walked uninvited into the stateroom of a man she had just met on shipboard. Faithful listeners were scandalized. Helen is now allowed to wear tight skirts and low-cut gowns, but she neither smokes nor drinks. Helen's enemy, Gossip Columnist Daisy Parker...