Word: sordidly
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...from the south up to Mannheim. These sequences, actually filmed in Germany, provide a vivid picture of towns and people gutted by war. The attitudes with which Germany met defeat are typified by the characters Happy encounters. There is a corrupt SS sergeant having his last fling in a sordid military brothel, an attractive girl turned to prostitution, a Prussian general who uses the noose to maintain discipline to the last. These characters, against a background of bombed out and burning buildings, give a most effective impression of stark, demoralizing realism. Happy takes it all in with the disillusioned expression...
None of 1951's scandals indicated thoroughgoing moral depravity, or even idiocy -just an inability to tell right from wrong if the question was put (as it usually was) in fine print. This uneducated moral sense led congressional committees through a sordid trail of mink coats and other gifts to Government officials. Casuistry reached a high point with the official whose conscience told him that it was proper to accept a ham under twelve pounds, but not a bigger one. Democratic Chairman William Boyle resigned his job under a cumulus cloud of influence peddling, and his successor was hardly...
What is the leading cause of alcoholism nowadays? Not the sordid living conditions that once led to "Gin Lane," say the editors of the British Medical Journal, but hangovers of old-fashioned Puritanism. "In Shakespeare's time," editorializes the Journal, "there were Puritans who condemned drinking out-and-out, and Falstaff is eloquently scornful of them: 'Nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine...
...this story, Greene apparently intended to show two things: 1) that saints are real human beings, who "happen" nowadays just as they always have and always will; 2) that no love affair, however sordid, can escape the terrible, endless implications of love. For some readers, he may have succeeded in demonstrating both; but for many his saint will seem as faraway and unreal as T. S. Eliot's Celia in The Cocktail Party...
...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...