Word: sheer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...people forgo their Sagan, their cinema and other well-known Gallic pastimes to watch a new-style quiz show called Tetes et Jambes, literally "Heads and Legs" but loosely translated "Brains and Brawn." On Brains, the glint of gold is only incidental to the visual gimmicks and the sheer fun of watching the nation's top musclemen come to the aid of the IBMinded. To take home his cut of a $5,600 jackpot, Brain must correctly answer a series of questions spread over four weeks. If he misses, the scene quickly shifts to a race track, a gymnasium...
...prove it, Willie the Shoe last week brightened the ninth year of his career by becoming the seventh jockey ever to ride 3,000 winners.) He is a patient, gentle, honest rider who somehow transmits his gentility to his mounts. They seem to run for Shoemaker out of sheer desire not to let him down. Shoemaker's finesse is a private communication with his horse...
...sunburst smile and flashes of his shrewdness, wisdom and trove of history. The camera and microphone etched the old cockiness and the saber-toothed campaigning technique as well as it caught the homespun simplicity and twinkling humor. Thanks partly to skilled editing, but mostly to its star's sheer self-characterization as an uncommon common man, the show was an uncommonly evocative historic document that made TV history of its own. Items...
Foot doctors began to be called chiropodists in the 18th century - just why is not certain.* Down the years they have winced as though somebody had stepped on their corns when patients mispronounced the first syllable "sheer" or confused them with chiropractors. The bookish among them were bothered, too, to find that H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage waspishly called the word chiropodist "a barbarism and a genteelism," added that the normal word for such a practitioner should be "corn-cutter...
...film then gains its merit from sheer movement and color and makes its myth come momentarily true in the abstract as if it were an opera and not a supposed documentation of an historical event. The Turks are all red-fezzed ogres, the common soldier and the people's general win the war for their oppressed brethren, and the Tzarist general staff is composed of dunderheads and tools of women. Bullets cannot touch the heroic leader, and his heroic troops stem the Turkish hordes by hurling rocks and corpses. A Bulgarian captive breaks away from his captors and, standing silhouetted...