Word: sordid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Homage to Cloacina. These, and a thousand other sordid details-all inspired by Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewers -appear in British Author Reginald Reynolds' Cleanliness and Godliness-"A Discussion of the Problems of Sanitation from Earliest Times to the Present Day." Unlike most plumbings of such channels, Cleanliness and Godliness is a first-rate literary essay, overflowing with sanity and bubbling with wit. Its heroes include Moses (whose laws, says Author Reynolds, were based less on divine sanction than on pamphlets issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Health); Elizabethan Sir John Harington, the inventor of the water-closet...
...abortions were performed in San Francisco last year. The city's booming birth rate ran a poor second with 16,400 babies born. These startling statistics were figured out by San Francisco's District Attorney Edmund G. Brown. Fists flying, the D.A. was wading into a sordid abortion racket which he claims lures pregnant women to the Golden Gate city from all over the West Coast...
...Argentina, too, paper was scarce. So the Government ordered paper firms to turn over 600 tons of it to three papers supporting Strong Man Perón's presidential campaign. With neat timing the U.S. Embassy let out some damning documents about the sordid pasts of the three papers. They, or key members of their staffs, had taken German bribe money in 1942-43, as photostatic copies of 13 top-secret Nazi documents proved...
...Council and protege of Mayor LaGuardia (who is a member of the American Labor Party). No Deal Candidate Morris said that he was actually a Willkie Republican. He is also a Yaleman, socialite and good-government career man, who told the voters that his rivals had reached eminence through sordid political deals. Yet his opponents accused him of making a deal with LaGuardia-perhaps for such a sordid purpose as taking votes from Judge Goldstein...
...German family is repeatedly referred to by the Soviet makers of this film as an average German family. Their sordidness and guilt, by strong inference, illustrates the sordidness and guilt of all Germans. Far from unauthentic, they are passionately ferocious caricatures of the globally ubiquitous petty bourgeois at his worst-a worst already recorded by such masters as Flaubert. Their sordid motives and moral density probably reached an all-time low in the world Adolf Hitler gave them to live in-a world which both encouraged and required the type. In spite of his zeal, Author-Director Mikhail Romm...