Word: staid
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With gaudy antiabortion posters set up in the normally staid Senate chamber, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and his conservative allies pressed for a constitutional amendment that would overturn the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision (Roe vs. Wade) that guarantees women a constitutional right to abortion. "The country is on a slippery slope to infanticide," warned Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama. "Even dogs have more protection than the unborn," said Hatch. But after two days of speeches in a largely empty Senate chamber, the ten-word Hatch amendment fell 18 votes short of the required two-thirds majority last...
...first, in 1928, led the staid Atlantic Monthly to produce a series of articles on "Lincoln the Lover," based on a cache of newly found letters: three ostensibly from Abraham Lincoln to Ann Rutledge, two from her to him and four written by Lincoln about her. The correspondence all too neatly verified the unsubstantiated legend that in their early twenties Lincoln and Rutledge had been sweethearts. Looking back after Rutledge had died in 1835, Lincoln in an 1848 letter to John Calhoun, an Illinois acquaintance, allegedly wrote: "Like a ray of sunshine and as brief?she flooded my life...
Between them, Constable and J.M.W. Turner define the supreme achievements of landscape painting in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, but Constable was by temperament incapable of reaching for Turner's ever mutating rhetoric of sublime effects. His work was more staid, more modest, less conspicuously "inventive." Painting, he considered, was "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." From Nicholas Milliard's Elizabethan miniatures through Rupert Brooke's pastoral poetry, a deep love of the particulars of landscape, nose thrust in the hedgerow, has always been central...
...national legislature for the first time. While most deputies arrived by car, the Greens marched to the Bundestag through downtown Bonn. Some carried flowers; others dragged wilted trees, which they said were killed by acid rain. Inside, the new representatives again added a touch of color to the staid legislature. Their jeans and sweaters stood out against a sea of somber business suits, while their straight-backed benches sported an array of potted plants and flowers...
...easy to know which is which. More than 6,000 San Diego citizens (and transplanted subjects) cheered and sang onshore at her arrival, but the visitor got on with business straightaway. She walked among 200 reporters (a fraction of those covering her) who had been invited aboard the comfortably staid Britannia to drink brandy and warm whisky. Mid-mingle, she had one American describe for her Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, in which a servant is cursed for manhandling the disguised English monarch...