Word: plaint
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industry is responding with little com plaint and a good deal of action. Today, 94% of the 1,726 plants that discharge wastes into the Ohio River basin meet the requirements set by the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission (v. only 75% five years ago). At its Houston refinery, Shell Oil now purifies its used water so thoroughly that fish swim in a pond at the end of the process. Ford Motor Co. announced last month that it will spend $1,000,000 to scrub liquid wastes flowing into the Rouge River from its Dearborn steel plant. Four major steel...
...France's Charles Aznavour it is the transiency of love that hurts. L'amour c'est comme un jour-it dawns, it dies. C'est fini, he cries, with desolate finality. You've Let Yourself Go is an unsparing plaint of conjugal disenchantment. Aznavour has none of the rakish charm of Maurice Chevalier, the ebullient high spirits of Charles Trenet, or the blatant sex appeal of Yves Montand. But he has two qualities that none of them possess with the same intensity-fire and sorrow. He was trained by Edith Piaf, and if one closes...
...striped: pants brigade of effete creatures." Instead of striped pants, today's diplomat wears three-button business suits. Instead of scintillating soirees, he attends paralyzing parties where his innards are assailed by "searing sauces and alcoholic depth bombs." Many is the career man, says Villard, who echoes the plaint of the late French diplomat Jules Henri after a ten-year tour in Washington: "I drank, God help my digestion, 35,000 cocktails in line of duty...
...ultimately bought by a Bombay movie star for $16,800. Import restrictions have made any foreign item desirable, including electric mixers, irons, refrigerators, hair dryers and record players. West Indian Author V. S. Naipaul, visiting India for the first time, records in his book Area of Darkness the xenophile plaint of a Delhi housewife: "I am just craze for foreign, just craze for foreign...
...plaint heard during the French Revolution is still widely applicable today. But perhaps even more pertinent would be a variation: "Oh, democracy, what travesties are perpetrated in thy name!" Everybody all over the world seems to want democracy, at least nominally. It is a coveted political status symbol, a powerful fetish. Yet Jefferson and Burke might very well lose their faith in reason or possibly flip their whigs, if they could survey some of the systems that today take democracy's name in vain...