Word: pious
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Babes in the Wood, O'Connor enters the shadow-world of painfully solemn, almost preternatural children who suffer from their elders' illicit affairs. O'Connor's bitterest stories are implicit denunciations of the sexual attitudes-or lack of them-of the prim, provincial and pious sort of Irishwoman. When a husband, desperately annoyed with his wife's unwifely reliance on the parish priest, is tempted to tell her "it was Father Ring she should have married," he refrains because he knows that "in time she'd be bound to confess it. There is nothing...
...house a tooth of the Gautama Buddha, brought to Ceylon for safekeeping in the 4th Century. The Portuguese claim to have burned this relic in the market place at Goa in the 16th Century, and since then successive teeth have been stolen from the temple by other invaders. But pious Buddhists still believe that the enshrined relic, a chunk of ivory 20 times the size of an ordinary tooth, is the original...
From the White House, Harry Truman remarked with a pious twinkle that the Republicans had promised to cut last year's budget (by $4.5 to $6 billion), had ended up authorizing expenditures totaling $200 million more than he had asked...
Other would-be Pagliacci jumped at the idea. Minerva Pious, weary of Pansy Nussbaum, was a creditable Lady Macbeth. Ezra Stone, still unhappily and profitably playing Henry Aldrich at 30, would try Shylock. Jack Pearl would try King Lear; Morey Amsterdam was set to do Cyrano. Henry Morgan agreed to do a show, but couldn't decide on a role: "Anything but Shakespeare . . . I told them to get me something where a guy goes crazy. With a little nudge I can go out of my mind quite easily...
...delicate task of polishing the mirror could not be hurried. The mirror had to be a paraboloid (a slightly deeper curve than a hollow sphere), accurate to two-millionths of an inch. Each grinding and polishing was done with fanatical watchfulness. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes, like pious worshipers at the door of a mosque; a single grain of tracked-in sand might scratch up the glass and spoil months of work...