Word: viles
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...Passed in the House, 360 to 21, and sent to the Senate a bill permitting recipients of offensive mail to halt further delivery. Under the measure, anyone could return to his postmaster mail which the recipient deemed "lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile," and have the post office notify the sender to discontinue the mailings. Federal courts could enforce the request...
...with China, eyebrows in the West rose at news of the surprise visit to Djakarta in November by Red Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi. Last week, while Russia was among those trying to head off Indonesia's U.N. walkout, Peking applauded it, ridiculing the world organization as "a vile place for a few powers to share the spoils." In any case, the objectives of Sukarno and Mao Tse-tung on Malaysia clearly converge: both want the downfall of its pro-West regime-a prospect that holds grave political and strategic implications for the West...
Since plain American speech suffices only to describe the real world, a new vocabulary must be coined annually at colleges, where all experience has a heightened tone and ordinary superlatives falter. Life calls for adjectives that mean better than best, viler than vile, cooler than cool. The contemptibly stupid, the awesomely brilliant and the inexpressibly attractive all demand labels more vivid than last year's. This winter's college slang is real unreal...
...troop: his termagant sister (Pert Kelton), a scold who would rather be righteous than right; a mournful Jewish crony, much dismayed that a recently deceased and cremated friend might be occupying the ashtray at his elbow; a refreshingly downbeat priest to whom God is all Greek and man is vile, and a medical fraud who takes Polaroid pictures of his patients at each visit to trace their rate of decay. These flavorful characters are impaled on a toothpick plot like canapes. The story that should make the play go makes it stop -whether Waltzing Dan can cozen a long-ignored...
...Lord Sebastian Flyte, in Brideshead Revisited >Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is a Tivian with a lifelong and unswerving Hatred of the 20th century's industrialized, democratized ways. From his first irrespressibly comic, murderously sar-comic novels (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies), most of Waugh's books have vad as their real subject the loss of a golden age. Looking back, the Oxford Vlnd Mayfair targets Waugh satirized in Viene '20s and '30s have largely vanished, Baking with them half the early novels' Viumor but leaving the rage intact. After World War II he suddenly...