Word: quaintly
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There is a secret, shameful part of every American that longs to attend a small, quaint, exclusive boarding school in the English countryside. The crack of the cricket bat, the furtive cigarettes, the obligatory corporal punishment--like buried memories from our Colonial past, they arouse atavistic, Anglophilic urges. Some people get their Brit fix from Harry Potter. They will get that, and much more, from William Boyd's brilliant, beautiful and exceptionally British Any Human Heart (Knopf; 498 pages...
Exiting the international airport in Colombo can be alarming: uniformed men tote guns, and there are acres of razor wire. Colombo's quaint commercial center is clogged with police checkpoints. President Chandrika Kumaratunga lives there; having survived an attempted assassination bombing three years ago, she's not taking any chances. In fact, there's little to fear. Nobody worries about bombs going off in Sri Lanka these days. You can travel just about anywhere on the island: to the northern peninsula of Jaffna or to the eastern beaches near Trincomalee, areas that were off limits for most of the past...
...sweaters and a flowered apron and sports a couple of gold teeth. Stay long enough and Nakamura will seat you by the space heater, serve you tea and apple slices and regale you with tales of the old days, both good and bad. In all, it seems like a quaint, harmless slice of Hometown Japan...
...resounding “oeuf!” as the burnt sugar crust required just a bit too much push to crack, and the chilled custard beneath (I prefer warm) had a hint of a stale dairy taste, suggesting that it had been in the no doubt adorably quaint Frigidaire for a bit too long. Even a cup of Earl Grey tea tasted like the parsley that was liberally sprinkled over everything else...
...Producers pick creaky shows to revive, hoping audiences can be separated from their $100 bills by the lure of ancient songs and what can pass for the old innocence. Composers choose a remote temporal setting partly because everyone else does, partly because the distant past accommodates their quaint or strained lyric styles; Broadway hasn't sung in a modern pop idiom for almost a half-century. The Street can't decide whether it wants to be a museum or a mausoleum...