Word: sump
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...slap-sticking echo of vaudeville who appears on TV's children's hour. The first time that Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles, O'Brian praised the act. But after the air waves filled with Beatle imitators, he called a halt. "If this vast musical wasteland, this sump, continues," he wrote in his column, "it inevitably will encourage young people to forget neatness, ignore barbers, bypass cleanliness and turn into a nation of slobs...
...Little Acre (Security Pictures; United Artists) is a literary locale in the moral sump at the dead end of Tobacco Road, and Novelist Erskine Caldwell mucked about in it so merrily that his novel has sold more than 8,000,000 copies in 25 years. Cleaned up for the cinema public, Caldwell's Acre still contains enough rich, smelly dirt to grow a mort of the sort of lettuce Hollywood loves best...
Through the week there was no violence and there were no anti-Dutch incidents. In Djakarta Dutchmen lolled in rattan chairs on their verandas, purposefully ignoring the sump-oil insults smeared on their house walls a fortnight ago. To counteract charges that the Dutch were being physically hustled out of Java, the government refused to allow foreign airlines to lay on special planes, made clear that the ejection of the Dutch would be gradual and proper...
...Adam (1933), The Just and the Unjust (1942), and now By Love Possessed. Still another novel, Guard of Honor, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1948. Nevertheless, the hardcover sales of all Cozzens' books combined (140,000) lag well behind that current dreary splash in a small-town sex sump, Peyton Place (250,000 copies). The interior decorators of U.S. letters-the little-magazine critics whose favorite furniture is the pigeonhole-find that Cozzens fits no recent fictional compartments, and usually pretend that he does not exist. This is particularly puzzling because no U.S. writer has rooted his novels more...
...have-no-shoes situation. The basement leaked for months without his taking any interest in it. Then, happily, one day during a strenuous spring thaw, it flooded to a depth of six inches. That was sufficient crisis to engage him. He sprang into action and within an hour a sump pump was making the house throb like an ocean liner...