Word: peculiar
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None of that is really the case, of course. When McPhee wants to he bristles with facts, peculiar laundry lists of numbers, even, stuck in odd-seeming places. And the seamlessness of his writing--it's nearly impossible to look back on one of his studies and think, despite their division into vignettes, that anything should have been put somewhere else--shows how carefully he organizes...
...somehow, even for those who know of and oppose the policies he pursued, he stands as a positive symbol, a symbol of good. Perhaps the same Kennedy phenomenon exists elsewhere--and I've been told that it does--but nonetheless it seemed to me a comment on a peculiar East European anxiousness to believe in America...
FICTION, of late, has occasionally suffered from a peculiar kind of affliction. Many modern novelists, given the temper of the times, have viewed the world as a grim, inhuman place, and that view has paralyzed them as much as it has inspired them. Practitioners of the Literature of Impotence and Exhaustion, for example, have tended to become impotent and exhausted. Samuel Beckett, unable even to bewail further the impossibility of expression, has written nothing of significance for twenty years now, except for a few anguished fragments (his publishers have taken to offering new tran-slations of old, discarded texts). John...
...called Yellow Book, Rosovsky's 22-page letter to the Faculty of October 1974, outlined his understanding of the issues peculiar to undergraduate education at Harvard...
...world is totally impermeable. Far too often he is reduced to saying "by all accounts," "apparently," "I'm told," "seems," and "I would surmise." At his worst, Sheed writes things like "I am told by those who know that being beaten up by a gifted father has a peculiar horror to it; all that intelligence coming at you twisted and roaring." What is bad about this is that Sheed has not a shred of evidence that Ali's gifted father beat him up, as he must admit in the next sentence: "Whether Ali's childhood was like...