Word: staidness
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...University may be commemorating its 1636 founding date, the Saltonstalls can look back five years earlier to find their American roots. It was in 1631 that Sir Richard Saltonstall's boat, the Arbella, came to the Charles River bearing Thomas' ancestors, and spawning an 11-generation Harvard tradition of staid Brahmins and liberal activists alike...
...mile-square City of London, Britain's once staid financial heart, events are exploding in most ungentlemanly fashion. Venerable brokerage houses that have dozed along contentedly almost since Edwardian times are merging or being snapped up by marauding U.S., Japanese or French financial institutions. Pinstripe City men who have known each other since Oxford or Cambridge days are rubbing shoulders with rough-and-tumble stock traders who sport little of the old-school polish but plenty of the street savvy that has suddenly become worth unheard-of six-figure salaries. Unable to contain the activity, the City is bursting...
...called for the demolition of the world's opera houses and denounced institutions like Lincoln Center as cultural supermarkets. Later, as conductor of both the New York Philharmonic and London's BBC Symphony Orchestra, he discomfited audiences by aggressively championing difficult new music. Ten years ago he stood the staid Wagner shrine of Bayreuth on its ear with a daring production of The Ring of the Nibelung...
There was some tough talk last month at a meeting in Washington of the normally staid American Association of University Professors. In an impassioned address during a daylong symposium on academic freedom, Chancellor Joseph Murphy of the City University of New York blasted a new right-wing watchdog group that he said was recruiting students "as a corps of thought police." The group, Accuracy in Academia, was founded last summer by Militant Conservative Reed Irvine as an offshoot of his flourishing (35,000 members) Accuracy in Media, which makes a business of challenging perceived liberal bias in major news organizations...
...Australian trip revealed the couple's considerable public relations skills, and turned into a showcase for their uninhibited style of royal excursion. With her nimble spontaneity, Diana is invigorating the staid ritual of the walkabout, the traditional version of which presents a gloved and hatted royal frowning to show interest as a dusty foreman laboriously explains how a widget is manufactured. Touring an aluminum smelter in the city of Portland, Diana could not stop giggling at the sight of Charles wearing a too small hard hat and protective goggles; with his Clark Gable ears, he looked rather like a Volkswagen...