Word: sorriest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...what the New Yorker call "sophisticated." Besides being childish ignorant of his own inadequacies and ineptitudes, moreover, he wears thick glasses, has a large nose, and is flagrantly Jewish. None of the hundred percenters on Ivy's back porch were in so repugnant a state as this; even the sorriest of them participated in only a few of the characteristics of such an ideal form, and then in an attenuated degree. But one can clearly see why a social club would only be sensible in excluding such an individual, whatever the wisdom might be of admitting him to the university...
...sorriest aspect of Uncle Willie is not that its story makes Abie's Irish Rose seem positively avantgarde; it is not even its stale and stupid quips, but rather its greasy benevolence. Fairly often, to be sure. Actor Skulnik shakes himself free from it: with a demonstration of how to walk so that shoes will not wear out, with a tale of how each month his landlord pays him rent, with a mere shrug or grunt or monosyllable, he can be a delight. But oftener he struggles, like a boxer, to outpoint his material, or like a magician...
Another abuse that should be eliminated is the free-wheeling committee, or Congressman, who plunges into an investigation of anything which looks like a headline. One of the sorriest spectacles of recent years was the flight by waterboys of three different committees to see which one could first grab a particular witness and the front page space that went with him. Each committee should be limited to specific areas, and then forces to stay within the bounds of the original grant of power...
When breezy Superintendent Herold C. Hunt first blew into Chicago in 1947, he found himself at the head of just about the sorriest school system in the country. It was riddled with corruption, its buildings were shabby, its textbooks antiquated; 4,000 of its teachers held nothing more than temporary certificates that could be revoked on a politician's whim. Nonteaching jobs were given out as patronage, and the third floor of the administration building was notorious as a distribution center of political plums. Things were so bad that the powerful North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools...
...that he might incriminate himself. He refused, for instance, to say whether he had ever known White or Lauchlin Currie. He even refused to say whether he was then & there engaged in espionage against the U.S. Cried the hearing's exasperated chairman, Senator Herbert O'Conor: "The sorriest spectacle . . . Very disgraceful . . . Coe should be dismissed summarily from his post...