Word: staleness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Britain's weekly Punch, then 112 years old, was acting its age when ex-Newsman (Daily Telegraph) Malcolm Muggeridge became the first outsider to take over the editor's chair in 1953. Muggeridge swept out the stale sweets of fuddy-duddy whimsy, reverted to an older Punch tradition by installing tartly satiric views on topical issues (and late deadlines to keep right up with them), brought in name contributors and able critics, all but abandoned the moss-grown cover for bright and varied modern ones. He even succeeded frequently in making Punch what Englishmen never expected...
...Winnetka's Hadley School for the Blind, has begun to run his fingers across one of the few up-to-date news stories available to him (most braille transcribing lags weeks behind publication dates, and for the deaf-blind, for whom radio is useless, news almost always grows stale before it is read). Kinney, who never heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls before he read TIME'S April 15 cover story, starts the fragile sheets on a postal round robin of some 60 Hadley School correspondence students. The chain breaks only when the tiny raised dots are worn...
Lace & Mendelssohn. The wonder of Elgar's career (he died in 1934 at 76) was not that he failed to become a great composer but that he accomplished as much as he did in the stale, lace-curtained musical atmosphere of mid-Victorian Worcester, where he grew up. The fresh gusts of new music blowing off the Continent never stirred Worcester, and Elgar did not venture as far as London until he was 22. His father was a church organist and sometime piano tuner, and Elgar was raised on warmed-over Mendelssohnian oratorios and cantatas. He played the bassoon...
...than Gallup polling, and potentially more sinister. Psychologist Dichter offers a smooth line in defense: "Persuasion is education. Ideally people should never be influenced, but the fact is they are constantly influenced by parents, teachers, etc. . . . Creative discontent is wholesome; only when the goal of persuasion is to instill stale contentment is it immoral . . ." But a Honolulu public-relations man has misgivings: "One of the fundamental considerations involved here is the right to manipulate human personality . . . What degree of intensity is proper in seeking to arouse desire, hatred, envy, cupidity, hope, or any of the great gamut of human "emotions...
...whole, Hitchcock's casketful of stories is a routine job. Many tales are stale: a few are fine. One doubts whether he actually submitted them all for TV shows, but he obviously likes to collect odd and uncomfortable stories. Whether he should be encouraged to publish them is debatable; collections should not always be made public. One of the charming characters in his book, for instance, collects throats...