Word: staid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Public prostitution flourishes more conspicuously in London than it does in any other major capital in the world, providing a sight that U.S. tourists, expecting London to be staid and sedate, stare at in fascinated wonderment. From noon until the small hours of the morning, London's vast troop of trollops are busy as squirrels in the fashionable West End as well as in Limehouse. Many have regular stations. They throng four deep on the sidewalks under the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus, patrol Mayfair, Park Lane and-Bond Street with the lighthearted aplomb of 4-H members...
...popular opinion was immediately and instinctively against seeming to condone homosexuality, an important minority of staid and conservative opinion favored changes in the law. The Times declared: "Adult sexual behavior not involving minors, force, fraud or public indecency belongs to the realm of private conduct, not of criminal law." Said the Spectator: "The present law on this point is utterly irrational and illogical." The London Economist thought that "private homosexual behavior between adults does no medical harm to themselves and no harm of any sort to others." Also in support of changing the law were the Church of England, which...
...television and the institution of advertising. Bearing virtually no kinship to George Axelrod's play of the same name, this Success, a happy direct descendant of custard-pie slapstick, is one of the silliest strings of sight-and-sound gags ever to jounce through the sober inhibitions of staid latter-day Hollywood. Producer-Director-Writer Frank Tashlin, a onetime Disney cartoonist and sketching fabulist (The Bear That Wasn't), plays the yarn strictly for laughs...
...Harold Warp's Pioneer Village at Minden, Nebraska," and "SNAKES!"), conjured up technicolor dreams as they stood in the weed-grown parade ground of Fort Laramie, Wyo. under the flapping flag of the most important post of Western frontier days. And few who took highway 340 through the staid Amish community of Intercourse, Pa. (just three miles this side of Paradise-pop. 549) missed the chance to mail some sure-laugh postcards...
Some newspapermen think that the staid A.P. is becoming bolder while the brash U.P. grows more conservative. Still, the differences in their handling of the major news are sufficiently marked as to demand a story-by-story selection by conscientious editors. The fact that such a choice exists is the best measure of the U.P.'s contribution to a free press. The Associated Press in 1907 was a well-entrenched monopoly whose foreign news came from cartels, such as Britain's Reuters and France's Agence Havas; subsidized or directly influenced by their governments, they divided...