Word: odd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some of these activities sound a bit odd, it is not due to the peculiarities of Iowans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Floridians or Tennesseans. Not even the Californians, who are conducting a licorice-eating contest in Burbank, may be said to behave any odder in August than in January. It is the quality of the oddness that is different, the ghostly spirit that affects the mind in August, so that while one is actually entertained by watching three mules dive into a 6-ft. pool, still a part of the same mind retains its distance, goes off on a private reverie...
...What an odd duck to have legs, as Madison Avenue puts it when a product moves briskly. The two-volume set, entitled The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession, has had steady sales and is going into a third printing, which for a book this size and cost is unusual. It has been reviewed favorably all over the block. David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian, calls it "the most remarkable diary ever published by an American." The thing puts people in mind of Pepys, Proust, Rousseau, all manner of citadels of personal penmanship. There is movie talk...
From its spiffy name to its extravagant scope, nearly everything about Television City has an odd retro quality. The project seems inspired by a Believe It or Not sensibility, the equation of freakish size and glamour that plays well these days only in Las Vegas. Sure, sipping a martini at sunset 150 stories up would be swell--once or twice. But Trump, a man entranced by superlatives, seems not to realize that few people any longer share his obsession with building a still taller tallest skyscraper...
There are plenty of these, especially in the pictures. Bare female breasts bob up in odd contexts, including a chapter devoted to the human back. Faced with such visual competition, Morris tries to keep his text and captions full of breathtaking assertions. Scarcely a smidgen of the 17 sq. ft. of skin that covers an average human escapes his hypotheses. Brooke Shields' full eyebrows and the small noses sported by contemporary male matinee idols both have something to do with the rise of feminism in the West. "The shape of the female navel has changed in recent years," Morris announces...
Like HAL in 2001, though, the computers are not infallible. The Target ran into what he considered an odd ethical dilemma about a month ago after a bank computer notified him that he had made two deposits of $1,000 each, when he knew perfectly well that he had made only one. If some gray-haired bank teller had inadvertently given him a $1,000 bill, the Target would have given it back, but he did not feel quite so certain that he had a moral obligation to correct the computer's error. Perhaps it would be easier...