Word: sisyphean
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...Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, this hilarious, sentimental, fiercely moral old tear-jerker is only a cousin by marriage to Pietro Germi's memorable comedy, Divorce-Italian Style. Its inspiration is the same rigid divorce laws that make marriage a last resort for Italian males and a Sisyphean challenge for the women who have to weep, cheat, wheedle and trick them into it. Under Director Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), the two stars pour themselves into their work and set charm flowing like strong red wine...
...cancer fighters gained another inch or so in their Sisyphean progress? Much work remained to be done before anyone could be sure. Said Warburg, after discussing the action of the anti-enzyme: "It must now be found out by experiment whether such an anti-enzyme will inhibit the growth of tumors in the human body...
...Wylies, the Cassandras, the Twentieth Century prophets of doom ceaselessly cry out in the wilderness of materialism. And well might they wail, for the instances of greed, ignorance, needless poverty, waste, hunger, violence, falsehood, hypocrisy, and half-truth are so plentiful that merely to enumerate them would be a Sisyphean labor. But the black gulf of pessimism is not the place to seek the understanding, the patience, the faith that is required by a generation that hopes to bequeathe a world at least somewhat better than one to inherited. Things as they are appear much less disheartening if viewed together...
...always tries, even when worrying about the Sisyphean task of teaching the illiterate three-fifths of humanity (some 1,200,000,000) how to read. Since 1930 lean, leathery Frank Laubach, a Congregationalist missionary, has made considerable headway with that enormous task. He and unnumbered thousands of other people, using his special teaching charts, have armed unknown and unknowable scores of thousands of Asiatics, Africans and Latin Americans with the double-edged tool of literacy...
...many collections of English proverbs, Compiler William George Smith's is latest, most definitive. His Sisyphean task took him about 25 years, netted him over 10,000 proverbs. Because ill-health downed him before he could ready his book for the press, able Assistant Janet Heseltine supplied the introduction and index. Compiler Smith lists his proverbs alphabetically, dates the earliest published examples, gives illustrative quotations, but is not always able to explain their origins. Since most familiar proverbs need no translation for native English-speakers, few are given...