Word: spinelessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...smallpox by swaddling the boy in scarlet robes, confining him to a room hung with scarlet drapes, claiming that the color's influence turned the trick. The 17th century court physician had less brass. When France's young Louis XIV caught syphilis, the doctors were too spineless to tell him (or anyone else). They also disguised the Sun King's measles by reporting that the royal body was triumphantly expelling subversive tapeworms...
Lest one might think from this that the Vassar girl's life is a mere round of spineless play, one is presented with a solemn full page of "Traditions:" "Salve" (a Latin greeting, not an ointment), which sings the praises of Seniors, vi-vo-vi-vo-vum; Tree Day, on which the Class of '61 must pounce upon a helpless and diseased elm and claim it as its own, thus "leaving its name with Vassar forever;" and such other unique traditions as Convocation and Matriculation...
THAT'S no ulcer . . . That's rot-0the rot that works in the belly of all you big shots." Thus, the hero of the latest novel about U.S. business, Company Man by John G. Burnett (Harper; $3.50), castigates his spineless section chief for caving in to the pressure of office politics. On the surface, Author Burnett's tale, revolving about a big U.S. airline, is merely one more in the long list of novels, from Frank Norris' The Octopus to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and John Dos Passos' The Big Money, that show businessmen...
...What a pity, my dear Walter [Tito's Comintern name]. You are now living and working in Belgrade instead of at my side here in Moscow. I would so much prefer to have a man like you here instead of these pigs here at my table, these weak spineless idiots I have around me all the time...
...night play. But as its Saudi employees learn to live more like Americans, Aramco itself becomes more Saudi. In its relations with the government and 53-year-old King Saud, Aramco maintains a policy so studiously circumspect that sometimes it seems to its younger workers to be downright spineless. Often it proves bitter as gall to the American workers...