Word: staid
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...staid residents of Washington should see a dinosaur ambling through Rock Creek Park, they would be surprised. Logically they should be just as surprised at the ginkgo trees, imported from China, which actually grow in large numbers in Washington. The ginkgo or "maidenhair tree" (so called because its leaves resemble maidenhair fern) is a member of the gymnosperms, most primitive of seed plants, and is a relic of the Age of Reptiles, 150,000,000 years...
...that apprised TIME'S writers that a new phrase had been canonized in TIME style. Disdainful of "gumchewers," he always chewed gum. Contemptuous of dead literature, he constantly held up Homer† as an example to TIME'S staff. Impatient of slow waiters, he disrupted many a staid restaurant by waving a napkin over his head to get attention. Generous, he would never lend a friend less than $5, said he was ashamed to ask for the return of a smaller...
Such was H. L. Mencken's first gleeful antic during the first week of the loftiest newspaper job in his career, the editorship of the staid Evening Sun. Thus was Mencken, his pale blue eyes agoggle, his single-breasted suit stretched across his bountiful belly, cocking a snook at his eager literary undertakers. Four years ago his plentiful enemies rushed him to his grave when he ended a nine-year editorship of the American Mercury. Said an American Spectator obituary: "It was most fitting that his last pieces were contributed to an ideologically bankrupt American Mercury and that intellectual...
...want King Edward!" had stodgy Downing Street seen such a demonstration. Thousands of London's Irishmen and Irishwomen packed the pavement before the black door of No. 10. The rousing strains of southern Ireland's republican anthem, A Soldier's Song, swelled from the lusty throats. Staid civil servants in black jackets and striped trousers poked their heads out Whitehall's windows. Suddenly the singing ceased. "Up Dev!'' roared the crowds. "A republic-no less!" A tall, gaunt, smiling man appeared for a moment on the doorstep. Then a surge of enthusiastic Irishmen swept...
...Darling Daughter," by Mark Reed is a constantly and intensely amusing study of what happens when Greek meets Roman, or when innovators and liberal thinkers throw in their lot with more staid and conventional livers. The comedy is perhaps principally one of situation, but this does not keep the characters from being creditable and highly interesting...