Word: shapelessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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McLevy lived as frugally as did Bridgeport. When the usual police-driven squad car was first offered for his use, he barked: "Get that damn thing out of here." He wore the same shapeless brown fedora for some 15 years. His frayed shirts were usually smudged, his brown or grey suits baggy, his high-laced shoes were scuffed. His only sartorial concern was that all aldermen wear straw hats, white gloves and carry dime-store flags in the Memorial Day parade each year. They did-and still...
Susan was almost ready when I arrived. She put on a heavy wool cardigan. "At least she'll be warm," I thought. Then a raincoat. "At least she'll be dry," I thought. Over that she put on a poncho. "She'll be shapeless," I thought. She put on loafers, a scarf, and a rain-hat. I twisted uneasily in my deceptively thin trenchooat...
...screen at Cape Canaveral, watched the canister soar free. Out swelled the silvery balloon. It took shape swiftly-too swiftly. The balloon expanded to its full 135-ft-diameter in two seconds. Then a rip raced across the silvery skin; almost instantaneously the great balloon tore into shapeless shreds. The pictures were so good that they could be reshown on household TV sets. Back to the drawing boards went Echo A12's designers. But airborne TV had already told them what had gone wrong: Echo A12 contained too much residual air, which made the balloon expand too violently into...
...called "the theater of the absurd." It is a school whose major defect stems from its chief virtue: it fashions hypnotic images of disorder to convey the sense of a disordered world. But the essence of dramatic art, as of all art, is to impose order on chaos. Flawed, shapeless, often inarticulate, the theater of the absurd nonetheless does generate excitement. In its surreal, evocative way, it tries to grapple with the way things are now, with the current condition of man, the creature of the Fall and the fallout...
...taking the gloves off," Wilfred MacDonnell, president of Great Lakes Steel Corp., told a Detroit press conference last week. Aides stepped forward with six aluminum auto bumpers, methodically proceeded to mutilate them by dipping them in corrosive baths, firing shotgun blasts into them, twisting and turning them into shapeless forms. Next, the same treatment was applied to six steel bumpers-which somehow managed to survive. Steel and aluminum are warring over the nation's largest metal market: the U.S. auto industry...