Word: matter-of-fact
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President William McKinley's wife used to have fits. If she suffered one during, say, a White House state dinner, McKinley would reach into his breast pocket for a large silk handkerchief, which with a matter-of-fact chivalry he would drape over her face. The President's forbidding dignity kept the conversation going, and when poor Ida, an epileptic, came around, he would remove the handkerchief and tenderly lead her back into the table talk...
...contrast between the matter-of-fact peacefulness of the scene and our own anxiety was almost beyond bearing. At 4 p.m. we would know whether the agony endured by so many for nearly a decade would have purchased an honorable end to the war in Viet...
...trick; it simply showed two ordinary but agreeable people falling in love and taking delight in each other, utterly without benefit of story. Kurys tries for the same artful simplicity. She introduces an appealing girl of 13 named Anne (Eléonore Klarwein) and her more worldly and matter-of-fact sister Frédérique (Odile Michel), who is 15. The director merely ob serves their small adventures as they grow a year older. Anne, a bit disdainful, watches Frédérique conduct a flirtation at the seashore; the two of them endure the strictures...
...contribution to it might lie: not in the exploitation of chance and random effects, like Masson or Ernst, still less in exoticism and neurosis, like Dali, but in hallucinatory ordinariness. One of the obsessions of surrealism was the way inexplicable events intruded into everyday life. With his dry, matter-of-fact technique, Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book: an apple, a comb, a derby hat, a cloud, a birdcage, a street of prim suburban houses, a businessman in a dark topcoat, a stolid nude. There was not much in this list that...
...legacy of colonial empires, the rise of new nations, the prospects of international organizations. Above all, he was an example of perfect harmony between life and work, character and deeds. He was a gentleman, with a mix of reserve and sensitivity, an utter lack of pretension, a matter-of-fact modesty, a curiosity about all ranges of experience, an attention to other people's thoughts and feelings, an absence of prejudices but not of standards, that made him an inspiration and a model for his students. And he was a kind of surrogate father for many foreign students who found...