Word: prig
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...Stopped (by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill; based on the Gill novel) deals with a classic stage theme: a fight over a will. It uses classic combatants: the disinherited black sheep and his self-righteous brother. As the glib playboy with a rusting charm (Richard Basehart) and the sententious prig with a rankling virtue (Kevin McCarthy) trade slurs-while their sister (Mildred Natwick) waves an olive branch -they lay siege to the holdings in the family vault via the skeletons in the family closet. Out, eventually, clatter illegitimacies and suicides and a crushed father image. And the disinherited playboy...
...slapper proved to be a paid agent of a group of nostalgics who call themselves The League of Empire Loyalists. He was fined a quid ($2.80) for his violence, but the sentiment that prompted it-disgust at a young peer who had dared to call his Queen a prig in print (TIME, Aug. 12) -was echoed even in the words of the sentencing magistrate, who declared that "95% of the population of this country are disgusted and offended by what was written, but your action only made a most unsavory episode more squalid...
Noah Had Three Sons. In 1880 young Anton was 20 and all but the sole support of a threadbare clan of eight. His grocer father was too broke to keep his family in staples. His two older brothers were swaggering Moscow bohemians. No prig himself, Anton can confess: "I was so drunk all the time that I took bottles for girls, and girls for bottles...
Though far from a prig, Richard Bland (71) is an unbending man. He detests war and all forms of violence, blood sports, meat eating and tobacco, and he once served a term in prison rather than bear arms. Far from holding these convictions against him, the people of the Lancashire mill town of Nelson have twice chosen little (5 ft.) Dickie Bland to be their mayor. "Nelson doesn't like Dickie's principles," said one townsman, "but it does like Dickie." Beyond ordaining vegetarian menus at official luncheons and showing his disgust at puffed clouds of tobacco smoke...
...correct his moral slackness. He watched himself for a month, and honestly tried to be more thoughtful, more helpful, more honest and all the rest. And then he found he was jolly well pleased with his progress. And he thought: 'Good heavens, I am becoming a prig! I must learn humility.' So he concentrated on humility for a week, and at the end of it he gave himself 18 out of 20 for humility ... I think that if the only standards are human ones, in man himself, self-righteousness is almost inevitable...