Word: limpness
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Mostly, Webster pictures the radio & TV audience at its moments of greatest strain: clubbed senseless by commercials, drowned in the soap-opera flood, lacerated by thrillers, held slack-jawed and limp before the endless, banal assault on ear and eye and mind. When his characters are caught with their sets off, they exhibit every nuance of the Walter Mitty syndrome: grandmothers speak to one another with the accents of private eyes; moppets dry-gulch their parents from behind the furniture; housewives confront "their startled husbands with all the teary grandeur of John's Other Wife...
LABOR Old & Healthy To more aggressive labor leaders, the American Federation of Labor has long seemed as limp as a well-chewed cigar. In 1938, after John L. Lewis led the C.I.O. out of the A.F.L., he said his new union "has made it perfectly safe for the A.F.L. to come along and gather up the butcher and the baker and the candle-stickmaker ... All they need to do is trail along . . . behind the C.I.O. and we will keep the wind off them...
...decades ago Hollywood was Babylon cum Samarkand cum Coney Island. The mind swayed like a prop palm before a wind machine; reason lay limp on the cutting-room floor. Pola Negri walked her leashed leopard cub. through the streets; Bessie Love drove a lavender-colored limousine ; Marion Davies* brought a marble bridge from Italy to span her 80-ft., saltwater swimming pool; and Dolores Del Rio let it be known that she drank only from a golden chalice. Even discounting the pressagents' fevered imaginations, it was a wondrously gaudy existence...
...excursions to Dieppe and Venice, he corseted the limp, nebulous, Whistlerian technique with steel-ribbed draftsmanship and an exact sense of time & place. He told his pupils: "You must be able to walk about in a picture. It should give you the sensation of something exciting happening, taking place in a box as it were, only the front of the box has been taken away so that you may look inside...
...first half of the 19th, the Red Sox scored two runs. But the White Sox came storming back with three and won the game, 5-4. It had taken the teams a record 36 innings to settle two successive games.* After that glorious comeback, the limp Chicago fans expected their heroes to sweep the fourth game for an even break. The White Sox led, 2-1, going into the ninth, but lost, 3-2. The buster-upper: Clyde Vollmer. It was the sixth time in seven games that he had knocked in the winning...