Word: wailful
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...ACTORS PLAY their roles dutifully and perceptively, but too often they tend to wail and to repeat the same frenzied gestures. Appearing overwhelmed by their characters' anguish, they give the production a pretentious note of melodrama. As James Tyrone, Kevin Walker seems the archetypal rough-edged Irishman: loving--if slightly clumsy--towards his wife, self-righteous and defensive towards his sons. But his mannerisms and reactions are too stiff and blatant. He gapes to show he's shocked, shouts to show he's angry. He fails to convey Tyrone's appealing undercurrent of charm, or any of his amusing qualities...
...sirens began to wail while all Israel was observing Yom Kippur, the holiest and also the quietest day of the Jewish year. By tradition, tens of thousands of servicemen were home on leave; Israeli Broadcasting had shut down for the day. As crowds of worshipers emerged from synagogues at the end of the five-hour-long morning services of atonement, they found the streets filled with speeding trucks, buses and Jeeps. By late afternoon, virtually every Israeli-and much of the rest of the world as well-knew that what Defense Minister Moshe Dayan defiantly called...
MIDDLE EAST The Quickest War No amount of warning, however shrill, ever quite prepares a people for the air-raid siren's scream. The first wail is always difficult to believe. In Cairo, last week, it scarcely disturbed the morning bustle of the bazaar. This was no drill. In stunning pre-dawn air strikes across the Arab world, Israeli jets all but eliminated Arab airpower-and with it any chance of an Arab victory. By Monday night, the end of the first day's fighting, some 400 warplanes of four Arab nations had been obliterated. Egypt alone lost...
...larger, more interesting kind of snobbery based on knowledge is language snobbery. The tribe of such snobs seems to be increasing, even as they slog through solecisms and wail eloquently that the numbers of those who understand the English language are vanishing like the Mayas or Hittites. Droves of purists can be seen shuddering on every street corner when the word hopefully is misused. Their chairman of the board is NBC-TV's Edwin Newman, their chief executive officer the New York Times's William Safire. One author, the late Jean Stafford, had a sign on her back...
...literature at Harvard and a life of devotion to Paradise Lost. The obituary in the New York Times made him out a gentle crank, quoting a complaint of Bush's that too many students attend universities these days, and thus cannot be adequately educated-the sort of hackneyed wail that Bush himself would never have dwelt on or even considered right plucked from a greater, kindlier context. Bush's world was the greater, kindlier context. Like Samuel Johnson he knew everything worth knowing. Like Johnson, too, he was born to teach books. Few people...