Word: staid
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...sales are bullish. On Wall Street the stock market has come back to within 15 points of its all-time 1961 high of 734.91. The business pickup has been greeted by every name, from the grudging "seasonal upswing" to the barely restrained "boomlet" now used in an advertisement by staid Standard & Poor's. The economy's performance has not yet earned the title of boom-and may never-but no one is willing to minimize how far and how fast it will...
...Detroit chapter of the National Society of Non-Smokers (she does not smoke) and the National Swimming Pool Institute. When Mary swam the Strait of Gibraltar last June, solicitous Spanish smugglers provided boats and guides. In July, a Turkish newspaper persuaded her to visit Turkey. She shocked the staid Turks by wandering around in Bermuda shorts, but within a month she made herself a national heroine by swimming the Bosporus (both crosswise and lengthwise) and the Dardanelles, then chugging 20 miles across the Sea of Marmara...
...American Bank Note Co. is a staid old institution that makes money by making money. The oldest and richest of the three U.S. firms that still print bank notes, it is a sort of job-lot treasurer that churns out paper money for 55 nations around the world, including Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt and Guatemala. From its presses last year 25 million stock certificates and 7.5 million bonds, all the travelers' checks for American Express and four other firms, corporate checks for more than 2,000 of the nation's largest firms, and postage stamps...
Verses like this, which today would hardly cause a raised eyebrow were they to appear in the Sweet Briar College literary magazine, burst like a sinful star shell in the stodgy gloom of Victorian England. Mothers clutched their daughters. Fathers bethought themselves of horsewhips. Staid critics, resorting to apoplectic prose, apostrophized the author as the "libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." But a youthful public in London lapped up copies of Poems and Ballads when it came out in 1866, and Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne became famous and infamous almost overnight...
Spoofing Mac was also the rage on television. The once staid BBC, which has reacted to competition from commercial TV with racy vigor, brought nationwide complaints with a satirical TV revue called That Was the Week That Was. One of the most outrageous TWTWTW skits featured a doctored newsreel of Macmillan, making it appear as if he were saying exactly the opposite of everything he really said. Another had Macmillan telephoning the White House. Says he: "Hello, Jack, this is Harold . . . Harold Macmillan . . . Macmillan...