Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...here seldom give their readers any data on South Africa other than its output of gold. Therefore, the people of the British Isles, with the exception of those of us who have been in the Union, know little of the terrible injustice meted out to the natives by a sordid administration aided and abetted by a fiercely reactionary Dutch Reformed Church, and passively if not actively enforced by a white minority, whose conduct belies all that Christianity stands...
Modest Yes. Faulkner lets Temple tell most of the story in confessional flashbacks. To set her sordid saga in symbolic perspective, however, he flanks dramatic dialogue with three incantatory prose sections. Flush with rhetoric and folk humor, these evoke what Faulkner himself calls "the vast splendid limitless panorama of America." They also invoke the high codes and courage Faulkner associates with the Old South, in this case the founders of Jefferson, Miss, in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, seat of Faulkner's fictional kingdom. The Temple Drakes, the Gowan Stevenses and their slack-spined, country-clubbing breed have corrupted these codes...
...week's end Chicago was ahum with investigations by Federal Internal Revenue agents, the Trotting Association, and the promise of a third one by the legislature itself. Said the Daily News's City Editor Clem Lane: "I suppose public officials will go on operating on the sordid principle that 'if it's legal, it's honest.' But at least we've been able to let the public in on what's going...
...tragedy of near epic proportions, but I'm afraid I can't go along with that. To me it seemed a dreary, overwritten, and sententious bit of claptrap. The play follows a company of penniless French actors on a tour of the provinces, and illustrates at length how their sordid existence goes from bad to worse. Playwright Lenormand's worst is pretty bad; for the hero it includes malnutrition, sleeplessness, alcoholism, and frustration--capped by a bad case of laryngitis...
...have had a bipartisan foreign policy in this country since Pearl Harbor. I would like to keep it that way. I know a great many Republicans who want to keep it that way too. Now is the time to put a stop to the sordid efforts to make political gains by stirring up fear and distrust...