Word: peculiar
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...peculiar situation when over 1000 people fill a church to hear a deeply religious work conforming to the strictest theological orthodoxy. It is even more bizarre in light of the contrast between the Christianity of Memorial Church (as aided by the Choir) and the Catholicism of Claudio Monteverdi's Venice in 1610. Monteverdi's exuberant celebration of the festival of the Virgin Mary outrageously flaunts Puritan restraint...
Grace Paley is a difficult and subtle writer. Her strengths are a peculiar quality and modulation of tone, and an ability to find the telling phrase--even her titles bear their own special attraction. Her sentences are dipped in a faint, pastel irony. Her narrators are people in the process of responding deeply, immediately, and with a fascinating restraint that molds it all into words. The hearts of her stories are less plots than the tense tracing of forces in some encounter--an encounter of people, passions, sensibilities...
...remorseful man, of one who had some secret sorrow or guilt" said Eliot's friend, Herbert Read. Matthews claims that this guilt, apart from being deeply ingrained (for Eliot had adopted, early in his life, his Calvinist ancestors' need for a constant sense of sin), was "centered on two peculiar obsessions which he stated as general truths: that every man wants to murder a girl; that sex is sin is death...
Racism in admissions policies at the GSAS evinces itself in a peculiar "feet caught in the bureaucratic mire" inaction. Although it is clear that the active recruiting policies of the late '60s did bring in a significantly increased number of minority applicants--the 31 enrolled in 1970 were an all-time high--the recruiting of the '70s has been, at best, perfunctory. The business of recruitment continues as a mere adjunct of the regular admissions process. No successor has yet been found for Joseph Strickland, assistant dean of the GSAS, killed in 1972, whose job it was to head minority...
...back ends have to be held up by rickety-looking stilts. Let one grey weathered house stand for the rest: Inside tall narrow stairs twist back up around a wide chimney. The room is hot and is smoky and full of that sweet sickening smell--like burning beans--peculiar to dirty houses with wood stoves. The plaster is cracking off the walls, revealing in places an old wallpaper from finer days, repeating and repeating a magnolia bordered portrait of your standard columned mansion house, through which irony we may fade...