Word: shrill
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...their plain wool sweaters, caring more for their pets than for their children, the Royal Family seems a parody of the pettiness and insularity of the English middle class. They might be the extended clan of Wallace and Gromit or cousins of Mrs. Proposition and Mrs. Conclusion, the shrill suburban housewives from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's as if the Windsors want to prove that although they're worth billions and practically define the term "idle rich," they share the tatty taste and myopic world-view of Britain's petty bourgeoisie. The grocer and the schoolteacher can look...
...highbrow and no-brow humor, of university wit and pratfalling physicality, must have seemed strange enough to U.K. viewers. But for Americans there were extra layers of mystification: the BBC in-jokes, the references to Brit politicians and seaside resorts, the sight of grown men speaking in shrill voices and wearing women's clothing. (They'd dress as a madame a lot.) The insular Englishness of the enterprise made it, for us, something completely different. We loved the heedless risk, the show's musk of comic danger...
...Hammadi's eyes brimmed with tears as he related the story. Then, he turned. Hussein's sister was being told the news. She kneeled before an older man, who was speaking softly to her, his face drawn, his eyes tortured. She cried out, "Hussein! Hussein!" in a long, shrill lament. She held her head in her hands and began to pull at her hijab while screaming out her brother's name. A young man tried to help Hussein's sister to her feet, but she couldn't bear to stand. Small children began to cry, and one little girl...
...This is terror. There are no red lines. They are shooting at ambulances on the road preventing them from coming here," says a distraught Mona Mrowe, an administrator at the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre, her voice sounding shrill with tension and anger. "I have felt death very close. Yesterday was really ...." Her voice trails off into silence...
...Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, or some other tome on globalization. It was a slim Japanese volume called The Dignity of a State. Written by mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara, the book is ostensibly a nostalgic call to return to ancient Japanese virtues. But it's also a shrill rant that blames free markets for a wide assortment of Japan's?and the world's?woes. "Globalism," Fujiwara writes, "is merely a strategy of the U.S. that seeks world domination after the Cold War." The author also calls the market economy "a system that clearly divides the society into...