Word: prig
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hawkins was a prig and a puritan, horrified at Johnson's well-known frailties of flesh and soul. He knew Johnson when Bozzy was still a schoolboy. But Boswell says truthfully enough that "from the rigid formality of his manners, it is evident that [Hawkins and Johnson] never could have lived together with companionable ease and familiarity." When Hawkins resigned from Johnson's famous Literary Club after a short membership. Dr. Johnson wryly pronounced him "unclubbable," and the tag has stuck...
...violent quarrels have become a way of life, to be ended, Eugenia believes, only when Brother Orestes comes back from the university to set things right. When he does show up, he is seen to be a cool, antiseptic young man who is more than a bit of a prig and utterly lacking his sister's sense of duty and fatality. He too hates what is happening in his father's house; but killing his mother, as his sister suggests, is the last, thing he intends...
...breezy, intimate flow of language and a sensual precision of phrase. Bullets whirred past him like "rustling silk," shrapnel made "the jarring sound of telephone wires when someone strikes the pole." Politically he was naive and jingoistic. Personally he was humane and brave. Some regarded him as an unconscionable prig-"a robust flower of American muscular Christianity . . . the artistic boy scout," William Rothenstein called...
...that educators have at least the responsibility of looking facts in the face. If they relax parietal rules sufficiently to permit girls to go to boys' rooms and remain there until late, then they should realize what the consequences are likely to be." He sounds like a prig, but I do not think that he intends to suggest that the need for emotional engagement will vanish if the most obvious opportunities are removed. Rather, he is speaking for the mental health movement that maintains the necessity of treating emotional problems as part of education, and he seems to be trying...
PoHyanna. Walt Disney's best live-actor movie to date sticks to the original lachrymose plot like warm icing to a sugar bun, tells the simpering story of the horrid little prig (intelligently acted by 13-year-old Hayley Mills) whose armor of cheerfulness and joy remains impenetrable to the sniffly...