Word: peculiar
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EACH IN its peculiar, "problematic" way, these three books portray a narrowly circumscribed portion of a large, complex world. One is no less a catalogue raisonne of human knowledge; another is an improbably tangled set of rules or bylaws; and the third is a sort of portrait gallery, with literally hundreds of faces staring off its pages. For all their diversity--and it is hard to imagine how three literary works could be more generically dissimilar--Courses of Instruction, Rules Relating and the Freshman Register share an odd way of looking at what is, after all, a very real Harvard...
...Intriguing sense of revealed wisdom pervades Chen's conversation, partly a result of the peculiar use of language- Spoken with a heavy Chinese accent, his words usually hover on the border between the incomprehensible and the profoundly suggestive. But as with the sage-like Stein in Conrad's Lord Jim, the half finished phrases, the almost aphoristic quality of his sentences, lend a mysterious weight to all he says...
...Stapleton's damnable dog, trained to kill, roams menacingly over the picturesque moors and prehistoric ruins that the art department enthusiastically ran up on the Fox back lot. Moreover, Director Sidney Lanfield was careful to keep his fog machines rolling, never permitting the sun to rise on this peculiar corner of the British Empire. The result, for viewers of a certain age anyway, is a sort of double-edged nostalgia: not merely for two beloved characterizations but for a whole vanished style of moviemaking, in which menacing shadows lay over every scene and divinely dumb people blandly insisted that...
...required for a recovery it is in the best interests of the nation that I step aside." Hathaway thus becomes the first Ford Cabinet appointee to step down-and also the shortest-tenured Interior Secretary since Thomas McKennan, who quit his office after eleven days in 1850, citing a "peculiar nervous temperament which too readily responded to excitement and depression...
Notice those peculiar markings that are appearing on all sorts of products on store shelves-the striped codes with ten-digit numbers that have rechristened such items as a giant-size box of Tide as 37000-91220 and a can of Campbell's tomato soup as 51000-00011? They are part of an automated pricing and check-out system that food-industry officials hope will one day yield impressive cost savings (TIME, Dec. 30). Though it is still experimental, consumer groups are already opening fire on the system, which they fear will confuse shoppers by eliminating price markings...