Word: pious
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...century, the O'Faolains were "shabby genteels at the lowest possible social level, always living on the edge of false shames and stupid affectations." O'Faolain's father was a police constable in the Royal Irish Constabulary; his mother was a farm girl, a deeply pious woman whose "religious melancholy withered everything it touched, like a sirocco." The ambition of both of them was to see their three sons reach "the highest state in life that anyone could achieve"-that of a Gentleman. No one of the brothers quite made it to Gentleman, but two of them...
...main item on the agenda is the pious wish to "establish relations among the Arab countries on the sound basis of love and genuine cooperation." But in the Arab world, love is a many-splintered thing, what with 40,000 Egyptian troops fighting a bloody guerrilla war with royalist tribesmen in Yemen, Morocco and Algeria still squabbling over their disputed border, and jails in almost every state jammed with Arab dissenters...
Rococo flourished mostly in France. The English, with fewer aristocrats, boast little more rococo art than Hogarth. In southern Germany and Austria, the style showed itself in churches whose walls dripped with absurd cockleshell trappings: in the 1770s, the Archbishop of Salzburg had to ban all "distracting pious trumpery and theatrical representations repugnant to the true worship...
Boxes for Tiaras. So many bag toters cling to the pious fiction that they are taking the filet home to Fido that almost every restaurateur has a story about the child who pipes up: "But when are we getting a dog, Mommy?" Exasperated waiters have been known to take revenge on such hypocrites by stuffing their Bowser Bags with bones and other morsels that only a dog would appreciate, or else by putting in strawberry shortcake and similar goodies designed to send a canine to an early grave. Zaberers' Old Gables Inn in Atlantic City simply labels its containers...
...Shawn, life changed forever in 1910. A pious, bookish student at the University of Denver, he was studying to be a Methodist minister when an attack of diphtheria left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ballet lessons were prescribed to aid his recovery. Private therapy was one thing. But dancing in public? When Shawn actually danced a waltzy pas de deux at an arts ball, faculty members were shocked and fraternity brothers sniggered. "Men," he was quietly informed, "don't dance." Shawn quit the university, and has viewed his art ever since as a logical "continuation of my sense...