Word: well-meant
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When one thinks of Boston, it is hard not to think of death and decay, decline and fall. Before we drop our tokens into the subway turnstyles and begin our survey, let me tender a well-meant suggestion that this matter of cemeteries recalls to mind. If you chance to take ill during the Summer School, ask to be admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, a fine place whose chief interest for us here is that the view of Boston from its roof is about the best in town. If you stay well, you can't possibly get up there...
...feels secure enough to joke about the trials and triumphs of his own race, but that he can laugh, in a sort of brotherhood of humor, with white men about their own problems, can joke successfully about the N.A.A.C.P. as well as the P.T.A. Gregory's emergence suggests that there may be a relaxation in the longstanding, well-meant but dreary taboo against "racial" or "ethnic" humor, and that it is once again possible to tell a Jewish, Italian or Negro joke without being regarded as a bigot...
...trouble is that Marie's husband is himself at odds with his background yet determined to force his wife to melt into it. The members of the clan jolly her with well-meant but offensive pleasantries ("Beware, madame! You're too slim; we like them well covered"); one old aunt shows her joy at their visit to her house by filling her mouth with orange water and squirting them with it. Marie resents the dirty restaurants, and he gets even by suggesting a local delicacy, grilled sheep's testicles. Before long, he manages to devise a hurt...
...John Hersey's The War Lover, a well-meant attack on war and warriors by a serious writer whose work in this book is not equal to the demands of his sermon...
...economists are quick to point out, all this does not justify well-meant outcries about "millions of starving people," nor is there as yet any sign that the world's capacity to produce food is diminishing. Though FAO statistics show that between 7,000 and 9,000 people die of malnutrition every day, actual famine nowadays occurs only in isolated pockets. The annual increase in total world food production is running just ahead (about 2%) of the increase in population...