Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...many a Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee now secretly drafting the Tariff Bill. Each had been placed under strictest party orders to keep his mouth shut, to babble none of the Committee's confidential doings to newsmen clustered inquisitively at the closed door. Silence was such an ordeal that some Senators ducked and dodged away by back passages, while others took the press blockade...
...best export butter"-one which would still be "best" after the 13,000-mile voyage to England. Each sample had been point-scored when shipped from Sydney, was scored again on reaching London by judges whose lips soon grew greasy. Wiping his own thin, determined lips after the ordeal by butter, Mr. Amery spoke cautiously on the question whether His Majesty's Government in Great Britain would grant imperial (tariff) preference to Australian butter. "Any such policy of preference," said the Secretary, "must be based on quality. We can never ask the people of this country in the long...
...usual torments of deprivation. Narcosan did them no good. It was too bad, for curing a dope fiend by standard methods is hell for him. He is given nourishing food while his supply of drug is gradually tapered off. Many a fiend, however, goes through the ordeal. He knows, until he is too poisoned, too besotted, that treatment is fairly quickly over. Its temporary sweaty terrors are preferable to the life-long degradation before...
...immortality. When this happens they have a routine gesture of generosity. They hang his pictures in the Luxembourg. For a minimum of ten years the pictures generally stay there. Thousands see them, thousands talk about them, the pundits study them. Only the work of genius can survive this bitter ordeal by familiarity. At length the enduring works are borne with punditical hosannas to the Louvre. The rest descend in devious channels to oblivion...
...minor points it is almost needless to touch. It would be insulting to suppose that a man who has more or less successfully passed the ordeal of the Harvard entrance examinations does not know that grotesque gold pins embellished with cabalistic signs and Greek letters are ornaments suited only to the barbarous taste of the Far West; or that on public occasions bad hats, seedy coats, and pepper-and-salt trousers should be laid aside. The suspicious diamonds displayed by the itinerant tradesmen who replenish their wardrobes from the refuse of our own would in themselves be a sufficient caution...