Word: vain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SATORI IN PARIS, by Jack Kerouac. The zestful, pie-eyed piper of the beats relates the details of a wacky safari to France in a vain effort to track down some supposedly noble Kerouac ancestors...
SATORI IN PARIS, by Jack Kerouac. The zestful, pie-eyed piper of the beats relates the details of a wacky safari to France in a vain effort to track down some supposedly noble Kerouac ancestors...
...almost gets away. In 1959, for example, Karl D. Umrath, a retired cash-register salesman, rang up the switchboard operator at St. Louis' Washington University one Saturday morning and told her that he wanted to give the university $1,000,000. Some-what dubious, the operator tried in vain to reach Chancellor Thomas H. Eliot, got no answers from several other officials. Umrath was just about to hang up when she finally connected him with the dean of the college of liberal arts. "I want to give a million dollars and there's nobody to talk...
...club today includes 286 doctors, lawyers, businessmen and journalists. U.S. Steel Board Chairman Roger Blough is a leading Penguin, so is Investment Banker Robert Lehman, Novelist Paul Horgan, Poet Robert Lowell and opera-loving ex-Boxer Gene Tunney. One opera buff recently tried in vain to buy his way into the club with a $25,000 "gift," but membership is by invitation, and openings usually occur only when a member dies. Though the club is frequently accused of snobbism, past President Robert Snyder, a corporation lawyer, declares that "economic status is unknown and unimportant. I imagine that William Rockefeller...
...went with George Patton. Temperamentally Marshall had nothing in common with the gaudy, poeticizing, rich, vain, bombastic, blasphemous fire eater. Once, Patton pressed his luck too far. At a private dinner, he used his friendship with Marshall to plead for a demoted colonel who had criticized the War Department. Said Marshall: "I am speaking now as the Chief of Staff to General Patton, not to my friend General Patton. You have encouraged the colonel in his attacks, and you have destroyed him. I will not promote him; never mention it to me again...