Word: woodenly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...eliminating the black box screwed on the wall. On top of a small metal housing, shaped like a truncated pyramid, is a fork carrying the transmitter. Inside the housing is the ringing mechanism, two musical gongs which may be rung emphatically with a metal clapper or softly with a wooden one at the subscriber's whim. Recessed into the housing is the dial, which operates almost noiselessly...
Herbert Marshall achieves perhaps the most moving performance in his portrayal of a generous and sacrificing friend, Frederic March, so wooden in Anna Karenina, makes something of a comeback as a gay young officer who goes blind in the war. In fact one of the bleakest scenes in months is where he's sitting around, blind and hopeless, trying to be nice to some stupid children. He puts across his various moods of hope and black despair with a reality and depth of feeling that Mr. March's audiences are not always treated...
Fortunately, the attitude that we're a little lower than the devil, and not to be exposed to the bare truths of human nature, but rather to be deceived into goodness by wooden heroes and lay figures, seems to be passing away. But, even worse, the other extreme has been reached. Everything good is questionable; and the bad is not bad enough. We live in an age of debunkment. In athletics, a golden crown has replaced the laurel wreath; the stage is obscene; art is acrobatic; music is barbaric; institutions are enslaving; life is a long slippery rope with...
...declared: "I am not an alarmist but we should not close our eyes to the inflammability of the materials we are dealing with and to the fact that inflation, if it should once get started, might sweep through the markets as fire sweeps through a city of wooden houses...
This new contraption, an affair of rope and iron rungs, will be encased in a wooden box with a plate glass front, just big enough to make a beautiful target for your foot. The idea is that at the first peal of the fire alarm, the unfortunate inmate of the room makes a flying leap at the box and kicks the front in. Then in one rapid motion he hurls the rope ladder out the window, first making sure that it is tied to something in the room, and clambers nonchalantly down the wall, trying to act as though...