Word: vulgarity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...result was usually a scandal. Connoisseurs could find their way about like owls in the brown murk of academic painting; Manet's light-filled colors simply made them hoot. His subject matter, all agreed, was worse than vulgar. Manet had seen fit to invite common people off the street to pose for him, he imitated the impossible glare of sunshine, and he even dared to picture nudes in contemporary settings. Napoleon III himself pronounced Manet's Déjeuner sur I'Herbe (see cut) a threat to public morals. Public disgust was summed up in one word...
Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors. -George Eliot...
...flaw in the troupe's production was neither its play, which was interesting if at times overdone, nor certainly the performances. The stage devices were a distinct weak spot-the vulgar and obvious music smacking of 19th Century melodrama, the sets shabby and clumsy, and the arrangement of the piece into a number of short scenes out-of-date and annoying. Victorian elements and language aside, however, the evening was distinctly an unusual and rewarding...
...Much of modern entertainment is meagre, vulgar, and meretricious. Its primary effect is the debasement of taste, the creation of false standards of value, the blunting of the capacity to find strength and happiness in the ordinary course of life. Literature is public property, can become a common body of experience. . . . Modern youth are moved, not by ambition, but by anxiety. The great stories recreate powerful examples of human thought and conduct-show principles in action...
From the first, the politicians on the board had baited her. They thought the old tricks would work: they had once driven another woman member off the board by making boisterous and vulgar remarks that sent her, weeping with embarrassment, from every board meeting. Such tactics didn't budge Mrs. Wulff...