Word: witlessness
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...assume (on no grounds) his guilt. He seeks him out and, in a state of mind half parlor-game, half maniacal sincerity, woos him as a "Master," a "Dark Angel," the modest herald of Rimbaud's "heyday of assassination." He drives the tricky, mousy little murderer nearly witless with hypnosis and fear. Inevitably too, he is no more enmeshing than enmeshed. In rage and shame as an amateur, a rejected disciple, he is drawn at length into a botched attempt at sexual murder...
Meanwhile, many a public official and newspaper inveighed against hasty and witless weddings. Cried Cleveland's Probate Judge Nelson Brewer: "Those young men who are unpatriotic and ungallant enough to marry purposely to evade the draft will leave their wives when the emergency ends." Said the Los Angeles Times: "Persons who take responsibilities lightly shuck them with equal facility. . . . The mass effect upon our social institutions of debasing matrimony into a funkhole for slackers is hardly an uplifting...
...charge, or no one fired it. British troops which had reached Flushing to the southwest and Amsterdam to the north, a French mechanized force which had reached Breda to the southeast, were all too slow, powerless or witless to intervene. Dutch Foreign Minister Elco van Kleffens said German parachutists disguised as Dutch police prevented it. In any case, preceded by one last torrent of air bombs upon Rotterdam, which stubborn Dutch fighters had twice cleared of Nazis, the invaders rolled over the bridge and into the city...
...nervous Nellie to be panicked into witless sales is tweedy, fiftyish Scot Gifford, Edinburgh solicitor, chairman of eight British investment trusts, director of 22 British companies. Nor will he be a sucker for casual Wall Street advice. Twenty-five percent of the investment portfolios of many British investment trusts is in U. S. securities, and Scot Gifford has long known his way around the Street as well as around the City...
MURDER IN SHINBONE ALLEY - Helen Reilly-Crime Club ($2). A rich old dodderer and the witless Willie Cleet get theirs before Inspector McKee finds out who shoved last year's unloved Glamor Girl off the 14th story art school terrace. Close to tops, with plenty of screwy New York types...