Word: prone
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like its original, the modern Gothic novel is prone to interest in tombs, graveyards, menacing strangers, cryptic portents, castles and ghosts. These are all present in A Singular Man, cleverly transposed into the idiom of contemporary Manhattan and ancillary Fairfield County. Smith has a great marble mausoleum under construction, air-conditioned, flood-and earthquake-proof. Smith moodily lurks there from time to time. The ghosts are of the contemporary autobiographical kind-Smith's own spectral guilty memories acquired in a posh Jesuit prep school. The furies are represented by the Press. Evil is represented by the abandoned power-bitch...
Government lawyers, well aware that juries are prone to be generous toward an injured plaintiff, figured that the FAA might be held partially responsible anyway, whatever the CAB said. Last spring they agreed to pay 24% of all damages that were awarded. But FAA Chief Najeeb Halaby protested. After all, he argued, his agency had been exonerated...
Just a week ago Harvard appeared a sure thing to win its first Big Three cross-country title since 1957. Coach Bill McCurdy who is not prone to undue optimism, said last week that "this is the year." The meet will be at New Haven today...
...Fiorentino Sullo mourned: "A truly Biblical disaster, like Pompeii." As the dead were stacked in a mass grave, angry Italians demanded an investigation. Before Vaiont Dam was built four years ago, local residents tried to get the hydroelectric project halted on grounds that the surrounding mountains were too avalanche prone. Mount Toe threw down such landslides so regularly that its nickname was "The Walking Mountain." But the government approved the reservoir anyway...
Mormons believe that Negroes cannot become priests-although Mormons define most active male believers as priests. Non-Mormons are prone to infer from this that Mormons are segregationists. The church replies that it has a right to set the qualifications of its own priesthood, and that excluding Negroes is no more discriminatory than the refusal of many churches (including the Mormons) to ordain women...