Word: plain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...National Selected Morticians, Inc. made it plain that there was no sense in taking too many chances. Remains that are dangerously radioactive, Mortuary Science concluded, will probably have to be interred by atomic scientists themselves...
...Better to Buy a Guitar." In Moscow, though the sun was out when Marshall's plane landed, things looked scarcely brighter. Andrei Vishinsky appeared, wear ing the steel grey Soviet diplomatic uniform with its star like a marshal's. The U.S. Secretary of State wore a plain overcoat and a neat grey Homburg. Reported one U.S. correspondent: "So in these strange times, a civilian dressed up like a general met a general dressed like a civilian...
Novelist Stafford (who is the wife of Poet Robert Lowell) tells the story of Molly Fawcett, a plain, wise little girl growing up near Los Angeles in the 1920s. Going on nine when the story begins, she and her brother Ralph, 11, are the "intellectuals" of the family. Molly writes poetry and reads The American Boy; Ralph has already studied the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Reproduction. Like any brother and sister, they sometimes fight, but the rest of the time they are such cronies and co-conspirators that Molly thinks they might one day get married...
...lion, a fairly obvious symbol of adolescent terrors and stirrings, is shot and killed in the end. Molly accidentally gets in the way of Ralph's shot, is killed at the same time-which is pretty dank symbolism and practically plain nonsense in any other terms. At her best Novelist Stafford handles the story well; but when she wants to be tragic she succeeds only in being melodramatic...
...admirer of plain speaking (especially his own), Gilbert detested hypocritical modesty in women, and such "ideal" types as mild-mannered curates. Of the clergy in general he was shy and suspicious. He also disliked his fellow dramatist William Shakespeare, whose writing he considered "obscure." "What do you think of this passage?" he scornfully asked a Shakespearean enthusiast: " 'I would as lief be thrust through a quicket hedge as cry Pooh to a callow throstle.'" The enthusiast explained: "A great lover of feathered songsters, rather than disturb the little warbler, would prefer to go through a thorny hedge...