Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After a pre-convention week of sordid chicanery, the delegates rose up on a moral issue and stopped the Taft steamroller. Five hours later, Douglas MacArthur, in an unforgettable address, diagnosed the ills of the Republic and offered a cure-the Constitution...
...been a sordid murder, and the victim, a small-time criminal, had taken his last lumps on a shabby barge moored in the Thames. Davidson, a riverman's son and an innocent bystander, happened to be there because his girl Fay lived on the boat. Fay was a big, handsome girl, and when the trial was over, Policeman Lowther courted and married her. Lowther is a decent man, rather long on conscience. He wants to protect his wife, who has never told him what really happened, but he also knows that Davidson has been wronged. The real kick...
There is Dincher the trumpeter, who thinks he can trade hot licks with Louis Armstrong; Timmy the homosexual dancer; Louella, a kittenish advance-guard poetess who wants to hang out with real cats; an impotent sadist who pushes (sells) junk to schoolchildren, and a sordid slew of others. Diane has a ball (doped-up good time) with all of them, but can't escape her own ritualistic premise: "There's nothing. There's nowhere, everything is empty." She ricochets from man to man in love affairs as monotonous as the click of billiard balls...
Sometimes Utsugi found it necessary to introduce the sordid business of jail. At one flower-viewing he nabbed a thief who had filched a pair of ladies' bloomers, and hauled the miscreant off to headquarters. All in all, he captured close to 3,000 Nip dips, including the acknowledged master of them all, Ito Tamotsu. These incidents were usually conducted in a spirit of professional courtesy. "Ah, Tamotsu," said Utsugi when he copped the notorious Ito with his hand in an alien pocket for perhaps the 19th time, "I have caught you once again." "So you have," acknowledged Tamotsu...
...daytime TV audience is now closely similar to the daytime radio audience -upper middle-class women find it dull, cheap, sordid; middle majority women find it gives them enjoyment and a variety of experiences." With this beginning, Chicago's Social Research, Inc., has published another report on U.S. radio-TV habits. Thanks to America's "middle majority" housewife, says S.R., television is coming...