Word: offhandedly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Humphries cannot salvage it ("0 winds, O little breezes, O streams, O mountains, O lakes . . .")-The gods with their king-sized personalities and jester-sized consciences dominate the Metamorphoses. Ovid accepted the Greek notion that the gods were created in man's image: lusting, brawling, conniving, cruel, with offhand streaks of decency -a prize parcel of divine delinquents...
...Your boy is going to have nothing but trouble in Europe, and, offhand, I can't think of a place you can send him which will be free enough from the horrors of sex for one of such tender sensibilities. You might try sending him to Philadelphia...
...would be better," said the brief, "to have no hearings at all than unfair hearings." Before the Supreme Court last week, Attorney Arnold suggested that the Government should either have provided Dr. Peters and all loyalty suspects with the protection of trial court procedures, or else simply fired them offhand with no public hearings and no public disgrace. "Is it your point," asked new Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, pinpointing the paradox, "that having set its hand at the plow in choosing a hearing method, the Government is then stuck with a due process hearing, and nothing short...
Along with its taming of an oaf, Bus Stop chronicles the far more offhand and slightly more underhand amour of the proprietress and the bus driver (Elaine Stritch and Patrick McVey), records the spoutings, slitherings and slumbers of a drunken professor (Anthony Ross). There is also the wide-eyed high-school girl who finds the professor wonderful, there is an unrambunctious cowboy with a guitar, and there is a local sheriff who perhaps stands for law and order in the world as well as on Main Street. In a beautifully paced and harmonized production, every part is well played...
...prototype for David Riesman's "other-directed" personality. He assiduously collects antiques, not because he really likes to, but because he finds it a useful conversational ploy in his business dealings. He poses in front of mirrors to see if his tailored clothes hang with just that offhand casualness that will give him an edge in a stockholders' meeting...