Word: spineless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...coldblooded urbanities lack the neurotic, compulsive tensions which made Boult what he was. Behind his big executive desk, Tracy is almost completely convincing but elsewhere-as in a sequence of sophisticated badinage in Miss MacGrath's sitting room-he is beyond his depth. As his sensitive but spineless wife, Miss Kerr reels in much of the slack of Tracy's performance with ease and authority. Except for some tasteless exaggeration of dress and manner in her final drunken scenes, her performance has an authentic finish...
...Lucifer with a Book" is not merely an accurate dissection of a specific school; it is a challenge to the teachers of America. "Was it perhaps that all these people who called themselves custodians of education were merely spineless dolls with the guts of sawdust, living in pretense because they refused to accept life as it was? Was it that those who called themselves teachers were merely playing politics on an enclosed checkerboard and parroting the thoughts of the Dead Great because it gave them a vicarious importance and authority? Did America perhaps justly laugh at her teachers and humiliate...
Even with its dying breath, the once-vigorous, lately spineless Star told less than the whole truth. It had just been swallowed-but did not say so-by the affluent and conservative Seattle Times, which would now have the afternoon field all to itself. For the Times (circ. 176,000), the deal was a bargain: at the markdown price of $360,000 it got the Star's precious newsprint contract. It also nipped young David T. Stern's threat to buy the paper and restore the lusty liberal voice that its late founder, E. W. ("Lusty") Scripps, gave...
...ashamed that crops, weather, family visits, meetings of Ladies' Aid societies, Jolly Hour clubs, bridge and church groups constitute the backbone of the news we print. But we are fed up with the insinuation that we are spineless, illiterate hicks...
...partly pretentious feeling for culture, he cares only, and then half-incestuously, for his daughter Regina. His treatment of his wife, along with her knowledge of his guilty past, has made her a violent hysteric; his contempt for his sons, the power-craving Ben and the spineless Oscar, has made them bitterly hostile. The fiercest struggle is that between Ben and his father. Constantly defeated, at the moment when he seems finally beaten Ben ferrets out of his mother his father's guilty secret. Being enough to lynch his father, it is more than enough to break...