Word: woeful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fight for independence, Ireland in the postwar years seemed to be hibernating, caught in a descending spiral of cynicism and feckless nostalgia. Its malaise was expressed by Playwright Sean O'Casey: "Someone or something is ruining us. What do we send out to the world now but woeful things-young lads and lassies, porther, greyhounds, sweep tickets, and the shamrock green? We've scatthered ourselves over the wide world, and left our own sweet land thin. We're just standing on our knees now." Bloody Baluba. Today the Irish are beginning to stand on their feet...
...Novelist Colin Wilson to the first of these notions. As to the second, the Diary will not sell sex, since the subject is presented at its worst-neither for play, passion nor procreation, but as a something-or-other that promotes the spiritual development of a prig. It is woeful stuff-the sort of Promethean flimflam that steams up from a painfully protracted puberty. One other question lingers in the mind: How was the author of this stupefyingly pretentious piffle ever mistaken for a young man of genius by London's most eminent critics...
...healthy-looking Mao, 68, was meeting in Peking, Hartini was taking in the sights of Nanking and Shanghai. At banquets and parades, the little-known Peking matrons plainly competed with her for attention. Had a clever government agent wanted a gimmick to divert attention from Red China's woeful economic failures, he could scarcely have dreamed up a better one. Mao's wife is a slender, handsome woman of about 45 who once acted in Chinese movies under the name Lan Pin, now calls herself Chiang Ching. She married him in 1939 after he divorced...
...Looking at my things." Theodore Robinson wrote in his diary, "I feel pretty blue. There are glimmers here and there of refined good painting-but a woeful slackness-a lack of grasp, of inspiration, interest." Once, on seeing some of his paintings in an exhibition, he spluttered: "My things are bum with one exception, the girl sewing, which has something redeeming." Actually, Robinson was rarely slack and almost never bum: he was one 19th century American artist who deserves more than the comparative obscurity that has been his fate. Last week a welcome retrospective of his work (see color) opened...
Frail Germ. What makes these woeful numbers so astonishing is that syphilis is completely preventable, and in its earlier stages is completely curable with inexpensive penicillin. More remarkable...