Word: leer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...compassion. Perhaps some of their ornaments are meant to symbolize their incipient conversion from tormentors to believers. For instance, one of the upper figures wears a sheepdog's collar and carries a peasant's staff-signs of protection for the flock. And the old man's leer may be hateful or tearful, but his gentle hand reaches for Christ's in a gesture of sympathy. The ironclad warrior, who is about to jam the huge prongs upon Christ's head, seems caught up and driven by some outward imperative of duty even as his lips...
...cases, e.g., The Key, Desire Under the Elms, defiance of the code has produced superior films that would have been flattened under rigid adherence to the rules. Says Luigi Luraschi, Paramount's agent in charge of code compliance: "Once upon a time the movies had a tendency to leer at sex. I think perhaps the first inkling was in the good foreign pictures shown here that handled sex rather forthrightly but still in good taste. American producers began to see the light...
...novelist's business as Toni finds that her familiar world is steadily rotting away because of the unease felt by the people around her. An old neighbor lady whom she has known from childhood cuts her on the street. At her summer school her instructor barely disguises his leer. Her younger sister pruriently prods her with questions. And Stan Walters shifts rapidly from guilt and remorse to jealousy and suspicion, accuses her of having invited the attack. Gradually, Toni moves into a limbo beyond sanity, and begins to wonder if in some way she had not asked for what...
...hair was skimpier, the waist thicker, but Comic Bob Hope, onstage at the St. Louis Municipal Opera in the Broadway role he created 25 years ago, seemed the same slat-nosed, perpetual lad with the innocent leer. Playing Huckleberry Haines, the matchmaking student bandleader of Alpha Beta Pi, in the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach musical Roberta, Gagman Hope (aided by his writers) stuck to the creaky plot, but inserted his old vaudeville number Invitation to the Dance, convulsed the audience with typical, topical Hopela: "The President is getting off better drives -he has Sherman Adams' picture on the ball...
Your March 10 criticism of the Reader's Digest articles on sex is annoyingly typical of the adolescent leer with which your editors approach the subject...