Word: straightener
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...gross and unrestrained one. He gave free rein to all his appetites-from women to power, and treated his Premiers as he did his girl friends, changing them constantly (five Premiers in one six-month period). After the birth of his only son he made a valiant effort to straighten up, and brought in honest Premier Hilary Pasha to purge the corruption that was endangering the government. But inevitably, Hilaly's probings led close to Farouk's palace gang, and the King dumped the honest Premier...
...statistical turn of mind, look like Herbert Hoover. The Indian and the engineer once met. Hoover was pleased to discover that each carried the same make of cheap watch (Gandhi's was pinned to his loincloth). "A mark of our common humility," said Hoover. The urge to straighten things out, shared by Gandhi, is what has kept Hoover so busily at work...
Conant, in a high-minded and far-sighted move, made his first attempt to straighten out the College's rather confused athletic policy in April, 1935. From that point on, he stated, athletics would "be placed on the same basis as the other activities of the University which are largely supported by endowment ... We wish to get away as soon as possible from the vicious connection between football gate receipts and expenditures for the athletic program." At the --same time he announced that, for the sake of economy, seven, minor sports would have to be cut off gradually from University...
...American, the most persistently recurring version of his background is that he was born Harry F. Gerguson in Brooklyn some time before the turn of the century, that he escaped from six successive orphanages, that he was farmed out to various individuals who tried to straighten him out, that he once worked in London, that he often landed in jail after scrapes with the law, that he was by turns a stowaway, a farmer and a movie extra, and that he early assumed the first of a long line of aliases, finally settling, more or less permanently, on Prince Michael...
Some parts of "Homage," conscientiously documentary are not easy reading; Orwell's attempt to straighten out the intricacies of the Spanish political parties the "plague of initials" will be of interest only to historians. The rest however is in the bright brittle Orwell style giving a good portrait of Orwell as well as of his time. Orwell was so peculiar to his age that Lionel Trilling calls him "virtuous". The label is a confirmation of Orwell's diagnosis of a sick world for an age so amazed at virtue is an age when nice guys always finish last...