Word: kempt
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...summer of 1845, on an Irish air long heavy with the smell of dung heaps, peat bogs and the personal reek of an ill-kempt and poverty-ridden citizenry, a new and more awful odor arose. Sulphurous, acrid, "like the smell of foul water in a sewer," it came from the almost-ripened potato plants, lay so thick that in some places it was visible as a whitish cloud above them. Where it appeared, leaves turned first purplish-brown, then black; stems withered, so that they broke at the touch, oozing a pus-colored liquid; the potatoes, when dug, were...
...Harriot visited Bonn, pictures the mean airless garret in which little Ludwig was born, the courageous mother who had been a servant girl, the drunken father who kept the boy practicing at the harpsichord for cruel lengths of time. When Beethoven went to Vienna he was an awkward, ill-kempt young man, flagrantly boorish at the fashionable soirées where he would sit down at the piano, pour out one improvisation after another. He wrote with prodigious energy. First came trios, quartets, sonatas.* The first symphony was criticized for what then seemed to be an excessive use of brasses...