Word: sordid
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...hardship affects matters of discipline too. At first sight, University rules and regulations seem harsh indeed. College gates clang shut at midnight and the walls bristle with wicked spikes. By day, a Proctor prowls around the University hunting for transgressors. Since tradition forbids the Proctor to undertake personally the sordid business of making arrests, he is followed by several 'Bulldogs,' gentlemen who share three characteristics: they wear bowler hats, they look like gorillas (big chests, long arms) and they run like the wind. If the traffic is heavy--and in Oxford it usually is--a good Bulldog can be relied...
...years Bobby was lost in the shadow cast by his big brother, but in 1958 he emerged as a public figure in his own right, as counsel for the Senate labor-management rackets committee. As he unfolded the sordid exposé of corruption and crime in the Teamsters and other big unions, Bobby momentarily overshadowed Jack, and his curled-lip intensity and Yankee twang became a television staple. It was a skillful, relentless and aggressive investigation, conducted at the man-killing pace that has become Bob Kennedy's trademark. When Jack decided to run for the presidency, Bobby cheerfully...
...announce the destruction of Babylon." Still others have compared her to everyone from Joan of Arc (defending popular virtues against monarchists with Napoleonic delusions) to Lolita. In fact, Zazie is less of a Lolita than a Parisian Pollyanna, for she is a warmhearted fille, completely uninvolved in the sordid sex life that she is always talking about...
Author Updike tells his depressing and frequently sordid story with a true novelist's power. His too-explicit sexual scenes are often in the worst of taste, but his set pieces describing Rabbit's crackup, his confrontations with wife, family, mistress and imploring minister show some of the surest writing in years. Up to a point Rabbit, Run seems to be saying that this is what much of life in the U.S. is like; certainly Updike's scene and people seem too threateningly typical. Yet the real weakness of the book is Rabbit...
...Scout, horrified to find the glory that was Greece reduced to such sordid circumstances, decides to do a good deed. With the secret financial assistance of the local vice czar, who fears the prostitute's casual price policy will ruin his market, the hero initiates a program of cultural aid to the heroine's underdeveloped area: the mind. Obligingly, the heroine at first abandons the pleasures of the body, discovers the pleasures of the intellect. But in the denouement she also discovers that when nature is denied, spirit suffers too. The film ends with a blare of strumpets...