Word: primness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Times writing can still be fusty and stilted, with a prim overreliance on the adjective clear. ("Term limits have been successful at bringing new faces into politics. Less clear is whether they're making any practical difference.") And when the paper tries to get hip, the results can be just clumsy. A self-consciously trendy Sunday styles section, launched in 1992, was an embarrassing flop. (It will be relaunched later this year, with a stress on service pieces and fashion...
...friend agrees. "Everything has been done, and everything has been stood for, everything has been fought over, and now it's basically like there is no more debate," says Alexandra, whose prim black cocktail dress and silver-buckled black vinyl corset (worn on the outside) make her a techno-goth--for the day at least. She is passionately apathetic, as if to spite her father, who demonstrated against the war from the City College of New York to Berkeley and who by his own count was arrested "about 11 times." But isn't there still poverty and inequity...
...instead of nationalist ideology in their movies and music, and surveys show they prize honesty, competence and practicality over old-fashioned lockstep thinking and knee-jerk anti-Americanism. With AIDS the third leading killer of Mexicans under age 35, they are demanding a more candid discussion in the traditionally prim media of issues like sexuality. The demands have helped spawn a renaissance in Mexican television, cinema and journalism...
LAURA INGERSOLL, 45 The no-nonsense head of the special task force of roughly a dozen lawyers is a diplomat's daughter who grew up in Europe and South America. Some colleagues compare her to the rather prim Diane on Cheers. They also call her tenacious, smart and ethical. Though she has little experience doing major trials, she's handled corruption cases involving CIA employees. Just last year she extracted guilty pleas from four Agriculture Department employees who rounded up contributions from colleagues and subordinates for a pro-Clinton...
...mother wit covers a multitude of crimes; a boyish charm can sell anything; vitality overwhelms prim moral compunctions. All three apply to Trainspotting, the Scottish comedy-horror show made for a Scots-thrifty $2.5 million. The wit is in the film's dialogue; it exhilarates even as it horrifies. The charm pours from Ewan McGregor's star-making turn as Renton. And the verve--that's director Danny Boyle's triumph...