Word: tactlessness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...many unhappy in what they were doing, nearly all of them worried about the future. Almost to a man they had walked out on the Army-run Manhattan Project and its boss, paunchy Major General Leslie R. Groves, whom most of the scientists regarded as a blustering, tactless, fanatically secretive militarist...
Someone must have made a mistake. Anyhow, tall, tactless Viscount Hinching-brooke, 39-year-old Tory M.P. for South Dorset, was invited to open National Savings Week in seaside Swanage. The Viscount did not say what he was supposed to say on such an occasion-quite the opposite. Cried he: "If the appeal to you . . . is national savings for the nationalization of the mines, my counsel to you is to reject it. If the appeal is national savings for a state-owned merchant marine or inland transport system or medical service, I would turn it down. I believe that nationalization...
...what manner of man he was. Some may agree with Critic Edmund Wilson's verdict: "In the days of totalitarian states and commercial standardization, he did not hesitate to assert himself as a single, unique human being." Others may ponder Woollcott's raging scream, made when a tactless lecture-chairman referred to his youthful success in female roles: "Look at me, boys and girls; half god, half woman...
Some commentators labeled the rebuke to Britain "rude," "tactless," "undiplomatic," "quarrelsome." But why had the statement been made? Behind it, obviously, was Anglo-American divergence on a basic question: what is democracy and how is it achieved? Both countries agree that democracy exists only when people in an orderly country have a free choice of parties and candidates. Britain asserted its right and duty to keep order in liberated countries until such a free choice could be freely exercised. Without apparently advancing any alternative, the U.S. condemned this as "outside influence." Britain's worry was that tightly-knit Communist...
...usual string of adjectives; he was prepared to give the delegates his idea of what the Democratic Party should be. Whether conservatives squirmed, or Southerners saw red, or New Dealers cheered, Henry Wallace's speech was the first that riveted the delegates' attention. It was blunt, brave, tactless. It easily explained why Henry Wallace was the best-loved and best-hated man in the Stadium. Southerners got a heaping dose of brine in their open wounds as Henry Wallace, no longer ill at ease, rubbed in the word "liberal" eleven times in his brief platform appearance...