Word: naivet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Morris, 40, and his colleagues are paying for their naiveté in Boston federal court, where Redgrave is suing the B.S.O. for breach of contract and violation of her civil rights. In testimony that was by turns rambling, deft and once even tearful, Redgrave, 47, argued that the cancellation of her $31,000, six-performance contract effectively blacklisted her for more than a year. The orchestra "may not be E.F. Hutton," her lawyer told the jury, "but when it talks, people listen." Redgrave testified that she was turned down for a role in a Broadway production for fear that...
...Civic Leader Brooke Astor, also praise him in what has become an almost monotonously approbative Gregorian chant. Andrew Heiskell, chairman of the New York Public Library and former chairman of Time Inc., says, "Greg has a strange combination of scholarship, energy, drive, salesmanship, enthusiasm and even a certain naivet...
...kind of student naiveté that would equate a speeding ticket with police brutality causes Danny to abandon his stance of amused tolerance. He retreats to a second demi-world, the "motley, traitorous émigré community." Alas, there the exiles have adopted native customs with a vengeance. The women wear gold boots with green hearts and T shirts with breasts printed on them. The men buy calfskin jackets if they can afford them, checkered suits if they cannot. During their frequent alcoholic binges, they plot absurd schemes for a National Liberation Army of the Czechoslovak People that will overthrow...
...stumbles when he tries to explain Humphrey's self-defeating diffidence. The answer may lie in the other legacy Humphrey left behind: a certain sweetness, a corny, prairie-bred conviction that folks don't have to be mean and nasty to get what they want. That naiveté was his undoing but also his strength. Early in his career, the politician asserted, wide-eyed, "The proof that God exists is that all men are brothers." Hubert Horatio Humphrey never learned any different, or any better...
...missile, she voted for it; when Reagan backed a silo-based MX, she voted against it. In the past year, as her political ambition widened, she has tried to plug the gaps in her knowledge, visiting Central America and the Middle East. In a remark that revealed both her naiveté and directness, she once exclaimed: "I didn't know what the West Bank was until I got there. It's so teeny...