Word: shrug
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...world. In both The Green Mare of Marcel Aymé and The Wicked Village of Gabriel Chevallier a fun-and-games attitude toward sex sets the tone, so that even the most serious consequences of immoderate passion are summed up with nothing more stern than a sympathetic shrug...
When he returns to Saint-Céré, where a housekeeper takes care of his two youngest children in a new house he has rented (no central heat, no bath, meals in the kitchen), the town elders glance up from their cards and shrug: "It's only Pierrot." But his organization men, waiting in the backroom, are excited and cordial, report happily of hundreds of new dues-paying members since election, listen while Poujade regales them with a bit of gossip from the big city and a lot of Poujade propaganda...
Sympathy, in fact, is something the new advance guard demands. Far from wishing to needle the bourgeoisie, as did the School-of-Paris moderns half a century ago, the young pioneers of American painting crave appreciation. When it is not forthcoming, some of them sulk and some shrug. But none of them seems to laugh. "To refashion the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, means an endless vital activity," they argue with Goethe. They solemnly reiterate that since impressionism, cubism and abstractionism have proved meaningful over the years, abstract expressionism will, too. And curiously enough, this wishful argument-by-analogy...
Having taken care of anyone who favors a protective tariff, Randall then clobbered businessmen for "evading responsibilities." Companies in metropolitan centers tend to "shrug off" their obligation to support the "schools, the churches, the hospitals, all of the community services, [which are] all a part of the price of doing business." As for higher education, said Randall, "only recently has industry begun to sense that there is an obligation on it to maintain by direct grants the universities [from which] comes the new leadership...
...calling attention to the report that Russia has been offering to supply Egypt with arms, no strings attached, and perhaps even to finance its dam. So far Nasser has rejected the offer. Was he thinking of reconsidering the offer? The answer was a rueful grin and a teasing shrug...