Word: luridness
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...inhabitants, was dwarfed by the huge cliffs that vaulted high into the sky above it. The cluster of tin- and thatch-roofed adobe houses looked fragile at the foot of that implacable slab of rock, whose only distinction from the surrounding stark Andes was its lurid clay-red color, which seemed to brood over some dark mysterious secret life in the village below...
Housewives in hair curlers knit sweaters at the wheels of then-station wagons in the predawn blackness of Miami. Young couples in Manhattan, armed with sandwiches and hot chocolate, invite friends along for an evening of gasoline shopping. Connecticut executives regale each other with lurid tales of mile-long queues and two-hour waits at the pump. Otherwise sane citizens are in the cold grip of the nation's newest obsession: gasoline fever...
...lowest common denominators, in which writer is set against writer, and creative mind against creative mind in a contest first for the bold, then the shocking, then the sickly fringe, and then, lastly the corrupt. It is degrading to society to be party to a race into the lurid. This is what happened in the case of the late Roman Theatre, and it was symbolic of what was happening to the culture. The stage was, at one and the same time, both the victim and the stimulator of a malaise that denatured a whole people, and made them easy prey...
...GREAT BIG UGLY MAN CAME UP AND TIED HIS HORSE TO ME: A Book of Nonsense Verse illustrated by Wallace Tripp. 46 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95. An apogee of anthropomorphism that takes a collection of crazy quatrains and lurid limericks literally and presents men and animals behaving comically like people. Wallace Tripp can do more with a sulky young rabbit, or a fox glumly watching water pour through his tattered umbrella, than anyone would think possible...
...recently revealed by the local party newspaper, Zarya Vostoka. It reported that 4,000 families, including those of many party officials, had simply dropped out of the Communist economic system and were living by private enterprise-on choice acreage along Georgia's Black Sea coast. The most lurid revelation was saved for the grave pages of Pravda itself. The party newspaper reported that with "party connivance" scores of "marble dachas" had sprouted "like mushrooms" all over Georgia, while shortages persisted in school buildings and housing for the average Soviet factory worker. One dacha had a billiard room and marble...