Word: sordid
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...some times cloudy, sometimes thin, that tones were tossed this way and that, sometimes too negligible to be tones at all. That evening she was no prima donna. She was Katiusha, loveliest of peasant girls, wrongly accused of the murder of a drunken patron; Katiusha, proud of her sordid conquests, begging money of the man who would reclaim her soul and then-a new Katiusha, who, renouncing him with three symbolic kisses of the Russian Easter, shouldered a pack to follow a fellow convict into Siberia. Tristan and Isolde, laid away for several seasons now, was brought...
Edgar Allan Poe once published a triumph of the imagination entitled "The Balloon Hoax," purporting to tell the tale of an enterprising newspaper's fictitious account of a balloon crossing the Atlantic. Poe was a dreamer; he wrote his little fancy for certainly no more sordid motive than profit. Today's dreamers spoof with "The Spokesman Hoax," with the ignoble design of evading responsibility- nothing more. Gentlemen breakfast, then naturally desire to know what the Chief Executive thinks, for example, about increasing, by Congressional legislation, acreage on Philippine rubber plantations. What do gentlemen read?". . . The Spokesman...
...what could be termed the middle class, were subtracted, the total population of the nation would remain substantially intact. The proletariat remaining contains millions of city dwellers drawn largely from foreign lands, sunk at the bottom of the social scale, and intellectually nourished on simple tales of virtue and sordid tales of vice. These form their gossip, their excitement, their cultural horizon. It is the pictorial papers that have recently thrown this class into relief and emphasized its importance. Three pictorials have thriven in the city of New York with a scarcely perceptible intrusion into the circulation of the older...
...result of the agitation leaves Yale alone to face the music. If the hand of the News has been responsible for the unveiling of sordid truths, it must shoulder the job of swinging the pendulum back to grace. What then is the result which we fear? It is that Yale must pay the bitter price of being an example. Yale, then, is an example, and has shown that the wet majority of the country will not retreat before this legislation. This being the case, a compromise is both desirable and necessary if young America is to grow up with proper...
...Cover Charge" has neither plot, nor beginning nor end. The aurnor purports to supply one in the career of Alan, the hero. What it comes down to is a series of sordid affairs strung together with a certain deftness which is hardly compelling. In flashers, Mr. Woolrich's characters stand out in three dimensions. For the most part, however, they remain the tinsel marionnettes which the author undoubtedly intended them to be in order to gain his distorted effects. He tries to be surprising and clever in his use of words and situations but he too often descends to sheer...