Word: shrug
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...Shrug. Biggest headache was France's recognition of Red China. The move had been well-advertised, but was no less nettlesome for it. De Gaulle shook off U.S. protests with a majestic shrug. "France," said he at a press conference, "is no more than recognizing the world as it is." To add insult to in jury, he took a poke at the 176-year-old U.S. Constitution, said it might be a flop anywhere outside the U.S. "Our constitution," he added by way of comparison, "is good. It has proved itself over five years in moments full of gravity...
Most of the immigrants shrug off any concern about the future. This is especially true of the newcomers from Europe, who consist mainly of married couples intent on finding their place under South Africa's eternal sun, and on enjoying the easy living in a land where nannies and houseboys can still be hired for $30 a month. Said an engineer from England, Philip Bacchus, who with his wife and two children arrived with 526 fellow immigrants on the liner Empress of Britain: "After all, there is trouble everywhere." But won't the new arrivals be sickened...
...honest stories now symbolize very little except Hollywood's desire to outshock TV (easy because the living room still imposes some restraints) and outsex foreign movies (impossible). European films have the best-looking girls; they also have a natural, if sometimes amoral, attitude toward sex, somewhere between a shrug and a prayer, between desire and fatigue, which makes Hollywood eroticism seem coyly fraudulent...
This lofty, Panglossian attitude underlies serious, if infrequent, professional misjudgments by the Foreign Office, notably Britain's brave attempt to shrug off the Congo crisis, as well as its extraordinary lapses of human judgment, as in its boys-will-be-boys disregard of such howling security risks as Burgess and Maclean. Since more than 90% of all its recruits are Oxford or Cambridge men, class-conscious Britons still echo the plaint of 19th century Reformer John Bright that the service is "a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the British aristocracy...
...Darrell Royal's Longhorns stuck to the ground so doggedly that wags cracked "They don't beat you; they just bore you to death." Carlisle threw one touchdown pass all season. But he did not complain when halfbacks hogged the points. And he even managed an elegant shrug when newsmen asked how it felt to play in the shadow of a star like Staubach. Said Carlisle: "To each...