Word: peculiar
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...some peculiar way, alcohol has become a convenient way to mitigate public embarrassments. Betty Ford, Joan Kennedy, Billy Carter and others have reported that their unsteady, occasionally weird behavior resulted from drinking. That sort of confession can be exemplary and thus publicly useful. But in others it can also be opportunistic. Maryland's conservative Congressman Robert Bauman pleaded not guilty to making homosexual advances to a 16-year-old boy; Bauman, with his stricken wife standing behind him - her eyes glazed with that I-am-not-here-I-am-actually-in-Chicago look - told a press conference that booze...
...manufacturing American Chicle factory in Long Island City, N.Y.; the workers who had spent years there making Dentyne and Chiclets were distraught. "It's a beautiful place to work," one feeder-catcher-packer of chewing gum said sadly. "It's just like home." There is a peculiar elitist arrogance in those who discourse on the brutalizations of work simply because they cannot imagine themselves performing the job. Certainly workers often feel abstracted out, reduced sometimes to dreary robotic functions. But almost everyone commands endlessly subtle systems of adaptation; people can make the work their own and even cherish...
While some rich people have done nothing to merit their fortunes, others have accumulated riches honestly, through hard work. But when these various species of rich people all adopt a certain set of peculiar and expensive manners, customs and attire, a pattern emerges. If they can convince the rest of us that their peculiar whims constitute good taste, they succeed in creating the impression that they are superior. Giving status to preppy fashions sported by the rich helps legitimize their wealth, however they may have obtained...
...year world tour. Grant dined with Queen Victoria, discussed war with Bismarck, and noted, with eerie precognition, the sorry history of colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The triumphal trip was not enough to catapult him back into office for the third term he sought in 1880. Still, his peculiar luck held. James Garfield, who won, was assassinated just months after Inauguration...
BEFORE THE FIRST LINE of dialogue is spoken. Bundy's The Hostage assumes a peculiar vaguely confused tone. The curtain rises on the delapidated lodging house: a light-haired woman stands beside a piano, waving to the audience. As she sits at the piano and begins to play. The company comes onstage and dances a jig. Their steps are careful. Scrupulously well-executed: you can see the concentration on their faces, in their wide alert eves, in their lips that move softly as they count the beats. The tinny sound of the piano and the gently pitter-pat of shoes...