Word: weren
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...good many Britons who said "Crisis? What crisis?" and weren't joking. This little thing they'd been having, they explained, wasn't a crisis worth the name. They said that what this country needed was a really bloody awful crisis, something so bad that people would have to take notice and put their backs into it in the good old British fashion. There is still a future for people like that...
...first four months things weren't too bad in Sandakan: the Japs looted thoroughly but neither killed nor raped anyone. Mrs. Keith was beaten up by soldiers while pregnant and ill and had a miscarriage-but that was only a mild foretaste of things to come. The prisoners were moved to Berhala Island just offshore. Women & children were housed in one crowded, ill-ventilated barrack; the men some distance away in another. Said the Jap commanding officer: "You are a fourth-class nation now. Therefore your treatment will be fourth-class, and you will live and eat as coolies...
...Berhala. The prisoners shared the floor with swarms of vicious rats. The diet consisted of rice sweepings, a tough, rubbery green vegetable and tea. For latrines there were two tin buckets. Filth and vitamin deficiency brought on dysentery, influenza, beriberi and several other diseases, mostly untreated. When the guards weren't slapping faces in anger, they were patting bottoms lewdly. Yet some of those same guards would unexpectedly share their food with the children, permit wives to see husbands in defiance of rules, even assist in smuggling provisions and medicines from friendly Asiatics on the mainland. But the kindnesses...
What had bothered Washburn into coming to Washington was the feeling he had got from his local newspapers that something was wrong with Congress. He had come East to find out what it was, concluded that Congressmen "weren't doing a damn thing," and decided to stoke the coals...
Playwright Deval's not unprecedented suggestion that moral values need not be the same for saints & sinners might have helped his play if it weren't so generally past helping. It is partly a mess because it hasn't a shred of self-respect. It trifles shamelessly with its material, trying to be dramatic one moment and comic the next. Worse still, it purveys some of its sex for leers...