Word: queerly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...theorems are found in a queer branch of top mathematics called "topology." A French mathematician, Jordan, gave the fundamental theorem of this study: every simple curve has an inside and an outside. That is, ever simple curve divides the plane into two regions, one inside the curve, and one outside...
...have had it with aristocracies. Corrupt, sleek, lascivious queer or cruel, Italian, French or Spanish, they all amount to the same thing on the screen: vacuity writ large. But the most banal set of all lives in Argentina. Its members are as vapid, unsophisticated and coarse a covey of brightly feathered birds as I have seen in film. Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (director of End of Innocence) records their antics in Summerskin, a cheap and pretentious story in the worst possible taste...
Agreeable Evasiveness. When the government fell in 1834, half-demented King William IV picked Melbourne as Prime Minister because he liked him. "I think it's a damned bore," sighed Melbourne. The populace agreed. "He is certainly a queer fellow to be Prime Minister," remarked a politician. His job, Melbourne believed, was chiefly to keep peace among his quarrelsome Cabinet ministers. By a policy of "agreeable evasiveness," he shored up his shaky government, weathered crises no one expected him to survive. He backed reform measures when he had to, but most of the time he happily saw them defeated...
Military men have long complained that Laotian soldiers will not fight. Political scientists have been exasperated by the Laotians' lighthearted attempts to govern themselves and by their queer habit of having two capitals, a political one at Vientiane and a royal one at Luangpra-bang. Last week it was the turn of diplomats to be amazed by the Laotians-and to discover that the two-capital system has some spectacular advantages...
...researching Alfie's abstruse legal quibbles, plump Lila Stuckley, his common-law wife, became a familiar figure in the British Museum's venerable reading room. Said she: "Oh dear. I find it all very difficult. Laws going back to 1742. George II and all that, and that queer language with all those double efs instead of esses." Alfie, to litigation born, delved up enough dusty arguments to sustain a two-year marathon through British courts. His most appealing line: by a convenient "flaw" in British law, prison breaking is nowhere clearly defined as a misdemeanor...