Word: prosaic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...philosopher, George Santayana stands as a paradoxical contradiction to his time. In an age of the splintered mind, he asserts the old Greek genius for wholeness. In an age of prosaic utility, he rates beauty first. In an age of ideological choices, he affirms "the free uses to be made of life." In an age of the fast answer, he asks the puzzling, fundamental questions about man's nature and destiny, the good life and how to live...
...generally more faculty personnel in the German department than there are concentrators. Besides four permanent appointees and an assistant professor, there is a substantial staff composed of men who spend part of their time teaching language courses and are delighted to help students with some of the less prosaic elements in the field...
Mark Tobey,* one of the Northwest's strangest and most famed painters, last week got the top recognition of his 60 years: San Francisco staged a big retrospective show in his honor. The pictures on exhibit dated back to 1917, when Tobey was painting reasonably realistic and somewhat prosaic still lifes and portraits. Since then, he has taken to reducing scenes and figures to luminous scribbles and to producing out & out abstractions-loose, slippery tangles of white lines that look as if they might have been inspired by a dish of spaghetti...
...dispassionate voice of Ruth Green-glass droned on. Gold paid them $500. She sensibly put $400 in the bank, she said, "bought a $50 defense bond for $37.50 and used the rest of the money for household expenses." Thus prosaic Mrs. Greenglass added her testimony to the story of a far-flung Russian espionage ring whose purpose was to steal U.S. atomic secrets (TIME, March 19). She admitted that she had recruited her husband into the conspiracy which included British Physicist Klaus Fuchs, Philadelphia Chemist Harry Gold, and Spymaster Anatoli Yakovlev, Russian vice consul in New York...
Whereas "The Seventh Veil" treats the introduction of conflict into an abnormal situation, Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" is a story of the disruption of a middle-class housewife's prosaic routine when she meets an equally prosaic doctor while on her weekly shopping trip. Here the flashbacks are less adroitly handled than in "The Seventh Veil," and the performance of Trevor Howard, as the doctor, is too enthusiastic for the setting. Celia Johnson, however, gives an excellent performance as the wife. Though she is on the screen for almost the entire action, she manages to maintain an atmosphere...