Word: rigid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Russians, of course, had refused to go along with the reform in their own zone. They put the event to their own use by halting all road and rail traffic into their zone, then set up the most rigid inspection yet for supply trains intended for western Berlin. At week's end the U.S. Army stopped supplying Berlin by rail rather than submit to the inspection. More clearly than ever before, Germany was partitioned...
...book is by no means as rigid or binding as the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer or the Roman Catholic missal; liturgical alternatives are offered for almost every occasion. But even so, the General Council's Seminar on Worship, which spent ten years preparing the new pew-book, "expects" (there is still no way of forcing a Congregationalist congregation to conform) that parsons will put it to good...
...play, The Time of Your Life made its author a modest fortune. Whether it will do as much for the Cagney brothers, who turned it into a movie, remains to be seen. It is a skillfully calculated improvisation for live actors on a rigid stage, and has an almost cabaret dependence on flesh-&-blood intimacy with the audience. Wisely, in this case, the screen imitates the stage rather closely. The whole rhythm of entrance & exit, bit and buildup is strictly theatrical, and the camera scarcely ever leaves the redolent barroom...
...things that used to be best about the best Disney movies are now so emphatically good that they verge on mere blatancy; the old weaknesses have grown a hundred times their old size. The draftsmanship is becoming rigid and frigid in a kind of gift-shoppe stylization. The outbursts of pure energy, though more restrained than in The Three Caballeros, still seem touched with homicidal mania. Nearly every attempt at cuteness, sweetness, tenderness, sublimity, results in one or another kind of painful simper. There is a frequent, unscrupulous alternation between the dreamy shimmer and the bang on the snoot...
Emphasis on marks, on performance up to a rigid, narrow, easily scaleable standard is emphasis on superficiality. With that superficiality an undergraduate can go astonishingly far in Harvard College without knowing what he is missing: for there are good things in the Yard to be gleaned by those who would. One senior about to graduate remarked recently that he had just read a book for a course and was amazed to find out how interesting the subject and the courses were. He wished he had done other reading for the course and had been to more lectures. He wished...