Word: shapelessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...neared these women it struck me that they did not look mysterious and alluring in their safsaris, as in Arabian Nights or in my fantasies. They looked anonymous and shapeless. Almost every woman gathered the folds of the robe at her throat with one hand and clutched an infant or a bag of vegetables with the other. Their identical, self-effacing garments (which, however, are not religiously sanctioned, and do not veil the face) and their burdened hands bespoke the modesty and servility which characterizes the Muslim woman everywhere...
They were unmistakable as they got off the Aeroflot TU-104 turbojets and into waiting Volga cars: somewhat shapeless heavy wool overcoats, dark gray felt hats and impassive faces that, to the knowing, suggest the KGB officer. Hundreds of them were flown in from Moscow to forgather in East Berlin's grim, hulking Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the nation's vast security-police network. Other Russian officers were dispatched to secret-police stations around the country. According to Western intelligence analysts, this activity meant that the Soviets were now directly supervising the campaign of repression...
...produced more reform than almost anyone had expected. The bill, which is likely to be passed by both houses of Congress this week, falls far short of the wholesale rewrite of the tax code that ardent reformers, including Jimmy Carter, demand. It still leaves the code resembling a shapeless coat crazily patterned by holes and patches. But its provisions add up to the most significant changes in tax law since 1969, and they will raise an estimated $1.6 billion of added federal revenue in fiscal...
...mildly hallucinatory to attend the Academy Awards for the first time. One flies 3,000 miles to behold the real thing, only to wander onto the set of a long and shapeless parody of the Johnny Carson Show: all has been pre-empted by television, redesigned in terms of the 19-in. screen. The rituals of former years have gone, or at least become so attenuated as to be barely recognizable. In the old days (one remembers from childhood newsreels) the stars used to come out, as they should, at night. Their exits from the black limos would...
This is landscape as seen by those who cannot escape, who must work on it. Such people were not rococo milkmaids. They were the rural lumpen proletariat, the rooted, shapeless mass brutalized by the agrarian disasters of the '40s and '50s. Millet was the first artist to make peasants a subject instead of an accessory. His paintings are an encyclopedia of work: digging, hoeing, planting potatoes, spreading manure...