Word: spoil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pretense. He has composed a highly creative rock-vaudeville show with all the acts: a tap number, a cowboy ballad, a torch song, and an acrobatic display of vocal jazz scatting. Altogether an excellent performance despite an overlying, oddly out-of-place air of melancholy that sometimes threatens to spoil...
...Spare the rod and spoil the child" may seem like a quaintly old-fashioned philosophy, but plenty of U.S. teachers still live by it. In a nationwide sampling of grade-school teachers by Grade Teacher magazine, nearly half of the 600 respondents said that they had hit at least one child during the last school year; 10% admitted, anonymously, that they had struck children more than five times. In addition, 70% reported that other teachers in their school had used physical punishment...
...Forster, collated musical strains lifted from numerous operas. The work concerns a family tragically victimized by circumstance and a villainous slumlord. The son of the house, Juan Valdes, is a junky and a pimp, and the daughter Aida turns out to really be ... well, it's not fair to spoil the suspense...
...also be argued that this is all part of a subtle master plan, as when novels are made boring to prove that the exquisitely bored characters that languish in them really find life boring. The danger in such cases is that one original, strikingly phrased thought could spoil the whole book. That pitfall has been avoided here...
Will success spoil Lee Trevino? Not likely. Last week, after putting the touch on his wife Claudia ("Honey, let me have a couple of hundred, will you?"), Lee headed for his favorite relaxing spot: the greyhound-racing track in Juárez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. "I never win anything," he confided. "I'm the worst picker of dogs in the world. I couldn't win a race if there was only one dog in it; he'd probably jump the barrier and disappear." It was, of course, Lee Trevino Night at the track...