Word: plain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...moldering eminences from the salons and academies of preimpressionist France, forgotten men like Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigna, Frangois Bonvin, Joseph Bail or Alphonse Legros, would some day be in the museums again and become the subject of excited scholarly debate, he would have been thought not merely perverse but plain...
Austen exaggerates nothing; given her target she scarcely had to. But she brings to this item of juvenilia the mark of an accomplished satirist: she sets foolishness off against an implied moral world. Near the end of her narrative, Laura recalls meeting a plain girl named Bridget: "She could not be supposed to possess either exalted Ideas, Delicate Feelings or refined Sensibilities - She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil & obliging Young Woman ..." To her later glory, Jane Austen was to make a lasting place in English fiction for such plain creatures...
...Beardsley was disabled by poverty and tuberculosis and defamed because of his association with Wilde and the supercilious periodical The Yellow Book. But the artist intensely disliked the writer and was, in fact, obsessively heterosexual. Yeats was to recall him in the company of a notorious London tart, "Penny Plain." His health failing, the God-haunted Beardsley finally converted to Roman Catholicism and implored from his deathbed to have "all obscene drawings" destroyed. Fortunately, Benkovitz notes, he was ignored. Without that pivotal oeuvre, the world of graphic art would be impoverished...
...Harvard men's lacrosse team, battered by injuries, inexperience and just plain lack of practice, suffered its fourth straight loss of the still-young season last night, dropping a 9-7 decision to Boston College, on the lighted Astroturf at Alumni Stadium...
...soldiers fanned out along a deadend track leading to Cerro los Ganchos, a favorite guerrilla observation post. Along the way, they stopped to search deserted farms, with their seed bins full of grain and with little family shrines with holy pictures on their plain walls...