Word: pungents
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Growls & Whines. Pulverized rubber, burned off the tires by the rough brick track, soon painted a black film on drivers' faces. Some drivers carried powder-puffs, some chamois, to wipe smudged goggles. The cars bounced down the rough straightaway, giving off pungent exhaust fumes; the vibration was hard on drivers' wrists and backs. But the awareness that each turn might mean disaster kept them tense and alert. The basso profundo of a Mercedes growled sullenly out below the whine of Maser and Offenhauser engines as the pack circled the 2½-mile oval...
...wart. Verruga is still something of a medical mystery. Nobody has ever found out how the sandfly acquires its parasite, where it lays its eggs, why it seems to have thrived only in one narrow area. Doctors have found no effective treatment for verruga. Natives burn animal dung and pungent eucalyptus leaves in their huts to keep out the sandfly. They also dose themselves with red wine and water in which corn silk has been boiled. Neither measure does much good. The natives appear to survive mainly because those who live through a mild form of verruga in childhood develop...
...Since becoming Secretary of State, Marshall has made one speech, a Washington's Birthday address at Princeton University; it left wide-open the question of his stature in his new job. He passed on a wholesome reminder that "peace is yet to be secured." In a pungent passage (which might be applied critically to the U.S. hands-off policy in China) he deplored the spectator attitude of many Americans. He quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Man is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to affirm the worth...
...Ball measures represented such a drastic rewriting of the ground rules passed by the New Deal (and by labor considered sacred) that the astute Bob Taft backed away. Harold Stassen, who came before the committee with a bland legislative pudding of his own, was solemnly aghast at the pungent recipe concocted by his old friend Ball. No more than half of Ball's measures would ever be accepted by the Senate committee. The industry-wide bargaining and closed-shop prohibitions would almost certainly be dumped. The bitter pill would be sugarcoated...
Wylie thinks he has the answer for juvenile delinquency, the high divorce rate, national psychoses such as Naziism and "iron curtains." He presents his answers, as usual, in ups & downs of personal sharpness and pseudo-scientific bombast, glib epigrams and gassy notions, often pungent and more often appallingly slipshod prose. At his best, Iconoclast Wylie pinpricks as sharply as H. L. Mencken ; at his worst, he is as full of unenlightening heat as Westbrook Pegler...