Word: graceless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rookie wideouts with 44 catches and 545 receiving yards. First, a broken foot kept him out for nearly all of the 1998 season; then he was sidelined by a sprained ankle in October. By last week, the only running the 25-year-old wide receiver could do was a graceless flight from charges that he conspired to murder his 6 1/2-months-pregnant girlfriend...
Because he was grudging and graceless, because he was not utterly candid and unsparing, because he kept alive old questions and gave life to new ones, because he was his worst self, Bill Clinton did not end this story. He left his friends what they so often are, embarrassed, and his enemies emboldened. He did not rob the engine of its steam. He did the one thing he absolutely could not afford to do: he stoked the fire...
...what about Currier?, you may ask. No gracious red brick exterior, no view even of the Quad. The plainest and most charmless of the Quad houses? The most graceless of all the Harvard houses? Well, yes, if you're passionately attached to the image of ivy-covered brick (and centipedes), white moldings, fireplaces and winding stairs. What Currier has instead: a cozy, bright, immaculate look (it's even cleaner than Pforzheimer); cheerful carpeting and comfortable chairs and sofas tucked in every nook and corner of the house; the most pleasant dining hall on campus, always sociable but never noisy, completed...
...ritual with its implicit boosterism ("Who do we appreciate--Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!") is "awful." In fairness, though, he could have mentioned some of the Tridentine excrescences that led to the Second Vatican Council's reforms: hymns of stunning vapidity and priests muttering their way through Low Mass with the graceless speed of tobacco auctioneers...
...extended exploration of ideas considered too trite or irrelevant for our learned discourse: that the honors for which we sell our souls are Faustian purchases, that the study carrels in which we spend January and May are lonelier than coffins, that the competitiveness here is a posture whose graceless stiffness no conversation with a tutor could soften. We have all become hunchbacks before our time and we have only ourselves and each other to blame for the burden, but that does not make it any less real. We know these things, we know that Harvard is sick...