Word: downright
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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London's West End is one of the world's great shopping districts. Its two main arteries, Regent and Oxford streets, and its capillary-like maze of side streets, are crammed with some of the biggest and trendiest names in retailing. But shopping in the West End can be downright exhausting: sidewalks heaving with humanity; the constant din of noise; traffic fumes; foul weather...
Other holiday-card designers are downright caustic. Order of St. Nick, based in Davenport, Iowa, has a Depressing Times section, which includes a card with a stark black-and-white photo of a man with tattered clothing, a dirt-smudged face and a thought bubble that reads, "The more I drink, the less I care that we lost our home in the subprime mortgage crisis." Another of its Dust Bowl-era holiday cards features a woman wrapping a gift. "I made you a Christmas present!" reads the front cover. On the inside: "But I had to burn...
...index cards. The book begins at a party attended by a woman named Flora. Her husband is not present, and she slips away to an absentminded tryst with a lover, which Nabokov renders delicately but unsentimentally: "That first surrender of hers was a little sudden, if not downright unnerving. A pause for some light caresses, concealed embarrassment, feigned amusement, prefactory contemplation...
Chalk up part of The Blind Side's success to a condition that might be called seasonal affection. With the big college teams fighting for conference championships and audiences in a beneficent holiday mood, the mass audience must have figured it was downright Thanksgiving-y to see a real-life uplifter about a crack addict's son who is adopted by a nice white couple and pulls himself up to be a star tackle at Ole Miss. (Sort of Rudy meets Precious.) It doesn't hurt that the movie's subject, Michael Oher, graduated impressively from college...
...from New York City to Paris agreed the takeoff was a thing of beauty. Imagine an apartment building with wings that steps into the sky with the quiet grace of a ballet dancer. The lack of engine noise - it's 50% quieter than a 747-400 on takeoff - was downright eerie. The A380 is so big it's difficult to sense its speed, and its upper deck is so far away from the engines the noise dissipates. (Read about TIME's best inventions...