Word: venial
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...venial sifts against the language seem to amuse rather than affront him. Under ROOFTOP, he complains mildly: "What would a rooftop be, anyway? Use housetop or just plain roof." He quotes a recipe. "Now throw in two tablespoons full of chopped parsley and cook ten minutes more. The quail ought to be tender by then." Then Bernstein makes his point: "Never mind the quail, how are we ever going to get those tablespoons tender? The word is tablespoonfuls, no matter how illogical it seems...
Summer is in no sense an important work of art. It lacks the creative energy to exhaust and essentialize its subject. But it does possess, among many venial delights, one cardinal virtue. Most U.S. films about children are goose-greased with old-fashioned sentiment or mink-oiled with the latest commercial variety of false feeling. But in Summer every moment of emotion comes in strong and clear and full, every moment is natural and true. Nobody who sees this film will want to deny that the Russian people can feel profoundly and can understand profoundly what they feel. Whatever they...
...author slipped on one quotation ["men must endure their going forth" should read "going hence"] and misattributed the Restoration opinion of Elizabethan plays; it was John Evelyn [rather than Samuel Pepys] who made the notation in his diary after seeing a performance of Hamlet. But these are venial sins. His judgment about the three big festivals, about American acting, Baconianism and some other topics is sound and pithily expressed...
...free world, and especially American, "failure." James Reston, the Times's Washington bureau chief, could contain his pent-up disdain for President Eisenhower no longer and dashed off a classic column of political satire. And Syndicated Columnist Joseph Alsop donned sackcloth in public and did penance for the venial sin of optimism...