Word: offhanded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cross-reference questioning, so that a subject who tias lied at the beginning of the interview will expose himself near the end. Beyond this, he has reinterviewed hundreds of subjects after lapses of two to ten years and they have told substantially the same story; this rules out carefree, offhand lying. However, Kinsey has found that males who have not gone beyond grade school are less reliable informants than the more highly educated, and probably they have exaggerated their juvenile conquests. Similarly, he concedes, women are likely to cover up, so that some of their indiscretions before or after marriage...
...Offhand, this novel has what seems a pretty used-up plot, the story of a tarnished Cinderella. Senorita Amparo Emperador was very beautiful, very poor, and an orphan, without beaux or hope of dowry. In Madrid, in 1867, that was about as bad a fix as a girl could find herself in. So Amparo had become a slavey for her distant, stingy relatives, Rosalia and Francisco Bringas, who kept her jumping from dawn to dusk and repaid her with spoiled food and a few rare pesetas...
Sometimes an offhand remark is revealing, sometimes misleading. I hope the latter is true of a comment by our new Secretary of the Treasury, quoted in your fine article [Jan. 26] on him. You report: "When he caught Mrs. Humphrey reading Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, he asked, with a wink, 'Why would anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure and never amounted to anything...
Fascinating Rhythm (Freddie Hall; King). An uptempo, two-beat scramble through the old Gershwin tune. Vocalist Hall mutters his pattering lyrics in an offhand manner that is good for a chuckle...
...delegates, he couldn't think of "a single one that General Eisenhower has gained." He counted 56 he had picked up since Ike came home, and offhand made a surprising claim: "he already has about 603 or 604 delegates" (needed for nomination: 604). The only question left, said bland Bob Taft, is whether to shoot the works and take the nomination on the first ballot or hold back for a while. As he talked, neutral polls gave him about 470 delegates...