Word: staid
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...etiquette book is one sign of staid old Debrett's new friskiness since H.B. Brooks-Baker, 47, an American who married a European aristocrat, took it over in 1976. He pushed the company into the black by reaching out to the British middle class and the American market, publishing books satirizing the rich and cashing in on the Roots fad by offering to trace family trees for Yanks...
...pure show biz. As a star platform personality, Jungreis comes on in flashy outfits of white, black or electric purple, wearing spike heels and heavy eye makeup. All that plus a slight Hungarian accent and blond wig make her look and sound a bit like Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Staid rabbis are sometimes scandalized by her delivery, which ranges from a concerned whine to a dramatic whisper. But lay listeners are held spellbound by her blend of polemics and pizazz. Sometimes they weep openly as she speaks about the possible fate of Israel or the loss of Jewish youths through intermarriage...
...Lorean still exudes the brash self-assurance he displayed in 1973, when he walked out of a $650,000-a-year executive post at staid General Motors to create his own auto company. To finance his factory, he approached rival governments like a baseball free agent dickering with club owners. The U.S. Government offered him $65 million in loan guarantees if his plant were built in Puerto Rico, but De Lorean took $114 million in loans and grants from Britain to make his cars near economically depressed Belfast in Northern Ireland...
Researching the Fleet Street career of G.K. Chesterton for a biography, I found it amusing to note that the staid London Times [March 2] was taken over in 1908 by a vulgar, pushy publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, who was known for his yellow journalism. Chesterton wrote that while "almost everybody attacks the Times on the ground it is very sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling, I say this journalism offends by being not sensational or violent enough. The vague idea that our yellow press is sensational arises from such external accidents as large type or lurid headlines [which] are soothing...
...finished addressing the packed House of Commons when an avalanche of outrage and derision descended. "A catastrophe of the first order for the British people," sputtered Opposition Leader Michael Foot. "Fundamentally wrong in concept and maladroit in detail," complained a fellow Conservative M.P., Peter Tapsell. Said London's staid Financial Times: "An admission of defeat by the government." Blared the tabloid Sun: "Howe it hurts...