Word: unctuous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...price of securities quoted in pounds. Once this law of nature was tested and found to be working properly, London 'Change was opened with a boom. Government bonds were firm, industrials soared, British bankers relaxed and grew self-righteous. "There can be just as much integrity," ran an unctuous phrase heard often in the City last week, "there can be just as much integrity in a pound worth $4 as in a pound worth $4.86." British tourists fussed and fumed as they landed at Manhattan, were offered as low as $3 for a pound by exchange offices...
...deductions. In one detail, however, the author's cocky memory tricked him. He refers to "a legend that a Mr. Astor, a cattle merchant, fed his stock great quantities of water just before he drove them to market. . . . His 'watered stock' made him rich." The trickster was the late unctuous, sniveling Daniel Drew, the cattle-watering one of the simplest and earliest of his many business rogueries...
...about chattering, apparently oblivious of the spectators. The job of selecting a chorus begins. Mortality was high among the sketches when first-night critics had done with them. Even the old hide-the-lover-in-the-closet blackout is exhumed. Boisterously the audience laughs at a burlesque of the unctuous radio announcer. Of the songs, all donated by their authors, four promise to be hits. Prolific Irving Berlin con tributes "Begging for Love." Others acclaimed with spirit: "I'm Just a Doorstep Baby," "Hot Moonlight," "My Heart's a Banjo...
Itinerant Methodist Preacher Isham Lowe sat his horse through the mountains of Tennessee, setting his course for the Georgia uplands. At his heels brooded Assistant John Semple. The time was 1830, the climate good for camp meetings. Preacher Lowe had been doing it for years; he had grown grey, unctuous, successfully stout in revivalism. Preacher Semple was young, thin, a little peaked; a poor mixer and not yet really saved; he sometimes found it hard to face crowds, hard to bear Preacher Lowe's booming optimism...
...Crawford, whose duty it is to portray the indecisions of the salesman's playmate, appears as a brunette in some sequences, a blonde in others. In almost all of them she acts well and makes her dilemma seem both plausible and pathetic. Actor Hamilton is a little too unctuous as the salesman. Actor Gable, hitherto an impersonator of hard-boiled characters, seems slightly puzzled to find himself banging a Salvation Army drum...