Word: worsting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. . . . There is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. . . . Modern writing at its worst . . . consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else...
...Theatre, Inc. totted up the chit. Sample items: 1) $92,000 round-trip traveling expenses for actors, scenery and props; 2) $75,000 theater rent; 3) $1,000 medical expenses, much of it for laryngitis, some for overeating. The grand total lived up to the sponsors' worst fears: more than...
...long, liverish, open letter to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Chicago's James T. Farrell, one of the most earnest authors and worst writers in the U.S., took issue with Canadian censorship. The reason: Ottawa had placed a ban on importation of his new novel, Bernard Clare, a lacklustre portrait of the artist as a young...
...fellow worker, Frederick Hibbs, stepped from a hiding place with two detectives. Hibbs and Harley had been schoolmates and friends for 35 years, but Hibbs would not condone railroading's worst crime - deliberate wrecking. The detectives were kind. "Why don't you say you had a brainstorm?" one of them suggested. Harley stuck with twisted dignity to the standards of the job that had warped his frustrated life. Said he: "I couldn't do my job of engine-driving if I had brainstorms...
...hunch is wrong. It is more like a parody on almost all his worst weaknesses. He has loosened his loose, gabby prose until it is as flabby as Nesselrode custard. His hero, Private Wesley Jackson, is a writer-of the Saroyan persuasion. He even has the Army job Saroyan had: writing scenarios for training and documentary films. And just to moisten the damp resemblance, Saroyan makes him a precocious Californian: Wesley is published in the New Republic when he is only 18-but it never goes to his head. Nothing does...