Word: joylessness
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...them looked happy. Those radiant, laughing faces which you see exhibited in so many Soviet propaganda pamphlets are sheer humbug. The people of Russia don't look like that. They look uniformly disgruntled and unhappy. It is plainly written on their faces that they lead joyless lives...
...Joyless was the face of Aubrey Williams when he emerged. He shut himself away from the press. As happy and rosy as ever was the face of one of the President's next callers. Trig and trim Colonel Francis Clark ("Pinky") Harrington, U. S. Army Engineer Corps, has been on detached duty with WPA since 1935 as assistant administrator in charge of construction projects. He, too, was properly reticent when he departed. But when he returned for a second call that evening, the press knew that Pinky (for complexion) Harrington was to get the No. 1 Relief...
English translators have generally found the Greek tragic poets too much for them, have produced tortured versions in an idiom neither poetic nor colloquial and almost impossible to read. In the joyless task of selecting the best, Editors Oates and O'Neill unaccountably passed up two excellent modern translations: Sophocles' Oedipus the King by William Butler Yeats, Euripides' Alcestis by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Otherwise, their handsome and handy collection presents all of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in about the best light available. More interesting to most readers will be ten "anonymous" translations of Aristophanes...
...color-even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone ... it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack into a dust cart standing outside the Army and Navy Stores, scattered along the pavement a litter of old envelopes; twists of hair; papers already blood...
Remarked Agent Moncure's widow: "If Dry-voting, Wet-living Congressmen could be made to realize conditions as they are in the greatest war of all times . . . I'd face my joyless future with calm resignation...