Word: pollyannish
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...Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian junta of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam is being held together by Soviet military aid and the presence of some 17,000 Cuban soldiers. Pondering the complexities of the Indian Ocean region last week, Brzezinski concluded: "I'd have to be blind or Pollyannish not to recognize that there are dark clouds on the horizon...
...half the nation's adults were drilled on numbing incantations of the Dick and Jane readers ("See Dick run. See Jane run."). Born in 1931 to Scott, Foresman & Co. of Glenview, Ill., Dick and Jane inspired competing publishers to beget their own families of white, suburban, middle-class Pollyannish imitations: Alice and Jerry, Mark and Janet, Jack and Jean. Now those ninnies are slowly being phased out. With a fanfare of press conferences last fall, Scott, Foresman launched new "reading systems" primers with an interracial cast of characters who change from story to story. Subjects now range from scary...
...bestseller may be a bit of a sob story or perhaps even related to the soap opera. Yet Love Story, in its Pollyannish way, does seem to be a purgative of sorts. Your parody, on the other hand, may be "a bestseller bested" or it may be pure pollutant...
...have listened with increasing distress over the past several months to the pollyannish placidity of the pronouncements by our government leaders and members of the "intellectual" establishment to the effect that the nature of Communism has changed and mellowed, that the Soviets wouldn't dare interfere in the Czechoslovak experiment with freedom...
Still, more and more people are beginning to feel that things are going well in Viet Nam, and Walt Rostow's elevation from the basement reflects far more than Pollyannish optimism. Soon after Johnson took office, Rostow (then a top State Department policy planner) said flatly: "Viet Nam is Johnson's Cuba; it will make him or break him." As one of the Administration's toughest-talking hawks, he began urging heavy commitments of ground troops early in Kennedy's tenure-nearly four years before Johnson actually made the decision in 1965. In a town where...