Word: tommyrot
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This is a promising first novel that breaks a lot of its promises. It promises a richly informative account of voodoo and the Haitian mind and temper, but much of it is just tom-tommyrot. It promises distinction of thought, but a jungle growth of involuted sentences often chokes meaning in mannerism. It promises a clash between the life of instinct and the life-in-death of inhibition, but the conflict is reduced to a kind of nagging suburbanality about a dissatisfied wife. Still, the tropical scenery is far more fascinating than most suburbs...
...action, cooled off rapidly and said he expected that the State Department, in the normal course of procedure, would forward an explanation. Mild also was his answer to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, who said McCarthy's charges of the Army's coddling Communists were nothing but "damn tommyrot." Wilson said he would not treat a waiter the way McCarthy treated Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker, and he added: "I always look down on people who are not polite to a waiter." Replied Joe: "I certainly hope Charlie Wilson and I don't have to waste time arguing about...
...course, the various problems of subversive activities have caused our own Thomas Dorgan to dig up his dead-letter tommyrot from the dust and mildew and present it again to the faculties to sign on the dotted line or else. Apparently Mr. Dorgan is not willing to be forgotten. But why the teachers should not, in a body, refuse to sign that absurd slip which makes them eat humble pie that a few politicians prepared for them is very puzzling...
...Horder, 80, famed as King George VI's doctor and currently president of London's Cremation Society, declared himself "quite willing to stuff the canvases into the crematoria. I think I should be doing a public service." Aged showgoers hissed such epithets as "hideous!" "unutterable!" and "sacrilegious tommyrot!" One bewildered old boy in a bowler growled that the paintings were just "like French politics-hopelessly muddled...
...That's Tommyrot." Although she has always been a progressive, Lucy Mitchell concedes that some of the early U.S. experimenters went too far: "Many were terrified of any kind of memory work. They thought if stultified the child. That's tommyrot. There's no reason why a child shouldn't spell well or why he shouldn't know his multiplication table...