Word: maladroit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...surprising restraint. The Smile is the story of a clown, Auguste, who throws up his career to find true bliss in just being himself. "To be yourself, just yourself, is a great thing . . . You try neither to be one thing nor another, neither great nor small, neither clever nor maladroit . . ." Auguste's search for his true identity is a dangerous quest and it ends fatally, but not before he has discovered that "perhaps he was all right just as he was . . . The mistake he had made was to go beyond his proper bounds...
...that Artie was the average American soldier. Like his G.I. cousins, Sad Sack and Private Breger, he was maladjusted, maladroit and wonderfully incompetent and unreliable. His grousing, griping and goldbricking were a vicarious safety valve for other G.I.s. Now Author Brown has introduced Artie to U.S. civilians in a collection of 51 stories. Brown's earlier best-selling A Walk in the Sun won acclaim as a serious work, but Artie Greengroin, Pfc. is not likely to be hailed as a great comic work...
...administrator (he planned Britain's remarkably smooth transfer to severe rationing) that he was soon in the key Cabinet post of Minister of Production. For a short while he was widely talked about as a Tory candidate for Prime Minister. But an early ministerial speech was so maladroit that the boomlet promptly collapsed. Said a friend: "He talks like Demosthenes with the pebbles in his mouth...
...many, is that "only people with poor equipment or foresight have adventures." On that principle, he usually makes use of all kinds of bleak understatements in his reports to his home office. One of them from London read: "Hotel just blown out from under me. Filing tomorrow. Regards." For maladroit London censors, Casey was a baffling problem. Effective was his ironic report of an air raid in which he reduced censorship to complete inanity by refusing to mention even the name of the country bombed...
Franklin D. Roosevelt has often been accused of misjudging the mind of the U. S. churches. Many a clergyman remembers Mr. Roosevelt's maladroit "How'm-I-doing?" letters to churchmen in 1935, plagiarized in part from a letter by Wisconsin's Philip Fox La Follette, and productive of an extraordinary number of blasts at the New Deal. And Protestants have latterly been irked by Mr. Roosevelt's preference for consulting Roman Catholic ecclesiastics...