Word: pleasant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...singing voice is pleasant but weak and is not (as with Ethel Merman, her partner and predecessor in this glorification of vulgarity) a thing which is funny in itself. Miss Walker must rely on her wide variety of comical walks, certain headgear which always manages to get in her eyes, outlandish get-ups which frequently hide all but that jutting chin, and a face that could never be forgiven, were it anything but funny. Above all this, Miss Walker has the common touch. (To which she would surely reply: "If its common...
...double exposure of the precious and the provincial, a caricature of manners and a comedy of airs, Make Way for Lucia is as full of gentility and small jabs as an old-fashioned pin cushion. Some of it is pleasant fun; virtually all of it gains from Mr. van Druten's deft and mannerly use of E. F. Benson's yellowing Lucia novels, and from the amusing exaggerations of a capable cast. What cuts down on the fun in Lucia is the too-great sameness of the cutting-up. The fun itself tends to be pretty thin...
Even after so many years there is no mistaking it-the voice of David Herbert Lawrence (died 1930), come back like an indignant ghost to nag the torpid flesh of Anglo-Saxons. It is not a pleasant voice: few of D. H. Lawrence's letters to his "friends" (victims would be a better word) show the genius that illuminated his fiction and poetry. It is a hectoring, querulous, spiteful voice, polite when it fears that it has aroused anger; but, once reassured by the listener's forgiveness, instantly rude and bullying again...
...York City's harassed and trigger-tempered bus drivers were given instructions for the holiday season. Instead of roaring: "Back in da bus!" they were asked to call out, "Please step toward the rear" in a "pleasant tone of voice...
...verse by older writers: Robinson Jeffers' crabbed The Double Axe, which most critics resented for its arrogant, unyielding isolationism; Paterson, Book II, a homey description of small-city life by William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor who versifies between paying patients; Mark Van Doren's pleasant New Poems...