Word: plain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glad-hander who never managed to look really glad. He was a campaigner who achieved a kind of glum sincerity even when his head was smothered under an outlandish coonskin cap. He was given to platitudes that put him foursquare in favor of "the best interests of the plain people of this nation" and "an even break for the average man." Some of his Senate colleagues insisted that there was a vacuum in the space between his ears. And he was a loner who became anathema to the national Democratic hierarchy...
...concert of Bach, Handel and Mozart, played by young German musicians in the 12th century cathedral that was shredded by German Big Berthas in 1916. Many of the visitors were invited to meals in French homes; even when they had to speak in sign language, the lesson was plain. The price of Verdun, as a German high school student put it, was not eternal hatred but eternal awareness that "we can help prevent the repetition of these terrible happenings...
...Church only to discover belatedly that they were not in one of Cardinal Spellman's parishes. The ceremony-conscious Anglo-Catholics seem oddly yoked in brotherhood with low-church "Anglo-Baptists," who frown on stained glass and statuary as Biblically forbidden graven images and celebrate austere Communions on plain wooden tables free of candles or crucifix...
...resort to odd expedients in a capital caught up in a nasty war, where secret police crack down relentlessly on opponents and where fear is a feeling in the air. To one oppositionist source who dared not see them, they sent a messenger with questions typed on plain paper and got back typewritten answers with no signature...
Just when it was becoming fashionably sick, someone had to come along and remind everybody that sex can be fun. The contemporary five-foot shelf abounds in incest, lewd vagrancy, homosexual hanky-panky, reckless driving, and other suburban indelicacies. Such misdemeanors seem thoroughly neurotic compared to the plain if repetitive dalliance of Fanny Hill, heroine of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, originally published circa 1749 and widely accredited as the first deliberately dirty novel in English...