Word: sordid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...straggling out hither and thither, with a small house or two a quarter of a mile from any other; so that in making calls 'in the city' we had to cross ditches and stiles. ... I was taken by surprise at finding myself beneath the splendid [Capitol], so sordid are the enclosures and houses. . . ." Washington, she decided, "is a grand mistake." She believed the capital was likely to be shifted any day to more central Cincinnati...
...revolutions in history was a very rich man, perhaps the richest in the Colonies. He was also a very simple man, a foxhunting Virginia plantation squire, "slow and awkward at introspection, which he regarded as something slightly sordid." He was a man of colossal dignity. He had thin red hair, outsize hands, feet, nose, jaw, and his outsize body was "skin wound on bones, with broad shoulders and broader hips." His face was deeply pockmarked. When he could not sleep, he used to reassure himself by stroking the scars. He was "a sickly man, and he had the sickly...
Among the tastier bits on the extra order list were: "Puree Mongoloid, with Pigtails," "Completed creamed Mushroom Soup with Cretins, (Little idiots with large heads)," "Filet of Soles (I were them myself, says the Colonel)," and "Sordid Cold Cuts...
When John Kirkland wrote the play back in 1934, its topic was one of importance and even though the critics claimed that it was too sordid to succeed on Broadway, the play caught on and was a sensational sociological drama. Since that time, however, the same topic has received fresher treatment and, at the moment, has lost its significance in the face of greater problems. Yet "Tobacco Road" still hangs on, playing to large audiences who have come mostly to be shocked by the fifth of the play. The present production is aimed just at gratifying this part...
Unlike the Japanese Army, which has built itself a pretty sordid record in China, Isoroku Yamamoto's Navy displaces better than its own weight in pride, and he has grown up with that pride. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in time to lose the first and second fingers of his left hand aboard Admiral Togo's flagship Mikasa in the great battle off Tsushima in 1904. Down the years he has absorbed and fostered the morale of Japan's Navy, the crafty conservatism of Japanese naval statesmanship, pride in such things as the superiority...