Word: peccadillo
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Come on, America! Why this constant introverted breast-beating about a national peccadillo? I suppose that it is your Puritan upbringing...
Uproar. His second term soon turned frustrating. Scarcely a month went by without some congressional committee grilling one of his friends for some peccadillo or outright misfeasance. China had been taken over by Communists, contributing to the charge that the State Department was "soft on Communism." When the invasion of South Korea started, Truman reacted with typical dispatch. In a space of 60 hours, he ordered U.S. forces into battle and got U.N. endorsement. When General Douglas MacArthur tried to bully him from abroad and issued battlefront ukases challenging U.S. policy, Truman did not hesitate. He recalled the hero...
...tangled webs of rubbery cord hanging from the ceiling like a three-dimensional version of Pollock drips-is partly an effort to give sculpture the fluidity of abstract-expressionist painting and partly a direct celebration of incongruity. Decoration, she believed, was "the only art sin." It was not a peccadillo she ever committed: ugly, difficult and raw though Eva Hesse's work is, it constitutes one of the most forthright statements in 1960s art. ·Robert Hughes
...newsmen produced one ten-pound peccadillo, and it came in the twelve-minute interlude between Senator Goldwater's acceptance speech and the formal end of the convention. Huntley said: "Senator Keating of New York seems to be leading the entire New York delegation in departing from the convention hall." CBS, at the same time, was accurately reporting the uneventful and orderly breakup of the crowd. Back on NBC, David Brinkley went on: "Three-fourths of the New York delegation has walked out." Outside the hall, Sander Vanocur then explained that Keating may have been miffed by Goldwater...
Constanza grows up believing that Papa's unmentionable crime was some dark, monstrous Byronic business. When she finds out that Mama's big Mad Scene had been over nothing more than poor Papa's peccadillo, she is unimpressed-particularly as she is already giving her aristocratic English husband a bad time, not because she won't put up with his love affairs, but because, sophisticated and all that, he just can not put up with hers. So Constanza is left with her daughter Flavia, who at the age of ten shows similar signs...