Word: witlessness
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...clear, calm day near El Paso, had flown upside down, and dumped 48 fear-stricken passengers* out of their seats. After some consideration they decided not to talk at all. But last week the Civil Aeronautics Board revealed the simple, if startling, truth. The whole thing had been a, witless practical joke...
London's 18th Century "bored and witless fashionables" delighted in the lectures of a quack named "Doctor" Graham. For his lecture on The Female, Graham used a half-clad model called the Goddess of Health (she was the beauty who became Lady Hamilton). For another, on Earth-Bathing, he sat naked in a pit of earth while explaining how much better it made his skin and blood feel. The big feature was the Celestial Bed, which would "rectify such physical impediments as impotence and sterility." To use it for a night, with unascertained results, a childless duke paid Graham...
...pretty thin to start with, and it is not even corn-fed from there on. The building of the Ark, for instance, is a nail-by-nail account that only a carpenter might care to follow. Author White, who wrote the book in County Meath, finds Irishmen slovenly, superstitious, witless and whining- when they are not irritatingly lovable, that...
...sharpest memory of the week is of that official, so tired that his voice trembled, quietly telling the inside story of disaster in his cold unlighted office. That night when I got home for a late supper, I was scared witless by a BBC voice saying down the hall: 'Coalition ... coalition ... coalition' and thought for a wild moment that our limb had been sawed off. It was the report of Attlee's speech, confirming all our dope that coalition was unthinkable...
Last week a brutal storm churned the Atlantic, and on Connemara's beach the fisherfolk, whipped like so many witless ducks by rain and spray, stood staring out to sea. For there in the darkness, where no land had been before, blinked the thousand lights of the city itself. Young folks squealed with the delight of it, but the old ones crossed themselves and breathed a prayer. "Go sbahailadh dia sinn" (God protect us), they muttered, for hadn't the ancient tale said, too, that when the lost city reappeared, Galway itself would slide under the water...