Word: inept
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There was not really all that much to shout about. In October 1899, by his own inept leadership, Robert Baden-Powell, commander of two regiments of a mobile "frontier force," succeeded in getting himself bottled up by Boer Commandant-General Piet Cronje. But if he was no military genius, Baden-Powell was an unquestioned success at public relations. During 217 days of siege, the dispatches from Mafeking were masterpieces of jocose understatement. Baden-Powell wrote some himself and censored those written by war correspondents. Either way, the adoring British public swallowed the stories avidly. They read of the jaunty commander...
...complex and bewildering war in Viet Nam without feeling obliged to offer elaborate justifications. Politicians, too, change their minds, and the good ones do so with such grace that people hardly notice, or such logic that everyone understands. Last week Michigan's Governor George Romney offered so inept an explanation of his shifting views on Viet Nam that it could end his presidential ambitions...
...platoon of temporarily paroled cons working behind German lines. For those who have not seen Mission: Impossible on TV or The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen in the movies, Garrison's Filthy Foursome might have some appeal; the video Nazis, however, are shown to be so inept that it is a wonder the war lasted so long...
Rumored Guilt. Beardsley was born in Brighton. His father was a blade who soon squandered a small inheritance; his mother, Ellen Pitt, a Brighton belle, was so slender that she was known locally as "the bottomless Pitt." For a while, young Beardsley was employed as an inept clerk in an insurance firm run by a relative, who was nearly as happy as Aubrey when the boy deserted business for art. But that career was nearly wrecked by Oscar Wilde as a consequence of Wilde's own notorious homosexual liaison with Lord Alfred Douglas. Though Beardsley's name...
...perfect woman to witness his return, in a charity softball game, to Yankee Stadium, scene of the personal annihilation he described in Out of My League. So George wooed and won Poetess and Baseball Maniac Marianne Moore, 79, who looked on indulgently as Pitcher Plimpton retired three inept opponents. Once George's tomfoolery was out of the way, though, Diamondologist Moore settled purposefully into the press box, with George at her side, to cheer through 18 innings of the regular Yankees-Twins night game, finally permitted Plimpton to escort her home...