Word: wretched
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Unhappy Wretch. After detailing the effects of the pause, the President asked the Congressmen for their views. When Mansfield's turn came, he pulled out a hurriedly written two-page
...passage describing how a group of Senators demanded that Lincoln reshape his Cabinet to their specifications to assure greater harmony. "Mr. Lincoln had no intention of doing this," the President drawled. "He had told a friend that all of the responsibilities of the Administration 'belong to that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln,' and as he tried to meet those responsibilities, the last thing he needed or wanted was a contrived or enforced harmony...
...finds them there, locks them up, and by the time the war ends the sentimental old wretch has grown so fond of his two prisoners that he decides to keep them as pets. Soberly, he fakes reports from the battle zones ("London is pffft") while the tumult of German reconstruction gets under way outside, sounding conveniently like the thunder of guns...
...mired, many an author falls back on a reliable device. He hauls his characters (and the reader) into church, and there, cloaked in clerical robes, delivers a sermon that sets everybody straight on what the novel is about. By extraordinary coincidence, literary sermons are always marvelously germane: no hero-wretch taken in adultery is ever made to sit through a discourse on the nature of the Holy Ghost...
...mill flattery includes tape-recording the professor's lectures, pretending to shift one's major to his field, and inviting the wretch to speak at one sorority house after another. One Northwestern sociologist finds graduate students going in for the "Gemeinschaft attitude"-getting folksy through baby sitting, for example. This puts them on almost unassailable ground: "How can a teacher flunk someone his kids like...