Word: needlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wealth for adequate health facilities, the medical service should provide the needed twenty-four hour service near the Yard. The added expense of maintaining two doctors through the night, one at 15 Holyoke Street and the other at Stillman, is a small enough price to pay for insurance against needless pain and possibly avoidable deaths...
...very interesting either. Several of them are frustrated women waiting around for some man to walk into their lives. But the man who finally comes, a one-time college athlete now turned bum, picks out the only engaged girl in the crowd as the object of his affection. Needless to say, the fact that the man to whom she is engaged happens to be the bum's sole college friend stops both of them only long enough to provide adequate running time for the film, and, of course, to get that picnic...
...Playwright Chayefsky lacks both the capacity and the concentration; his play trades in banalities more pretentious than any it chronicles. It lists characters in the program as The Girl, The Kid Sister, The Manufacturer; it does not list scene changes but flashes them on a movie screen; it inserts needless incidental music. And there is the sudden happy ending-ascribable, perhaps, to reckless optimism on the lovers' part, but more easily to commercial pessimism on the author's about harsher endings...
...resonance or fragrance: it offers fly-specks rather than patina, flatted notes oftener than chords. Chekhov boils down his characters' moral attitudes to reveal personal resentments, and shows the flabbiness of it-might-have-been no less than the pathos. But just because his people exhibit as much needless waste as honest wear in their lives, they are extraordinarily human and central. And because Chekhov was compassionate as well as lynx-eyed, Vanya shows how real the hurts can be, however comic the poses and self-pities...
...makes 'em tick." This urge has sent thousands of readers to book stores in order to buy monodies on everyone from a nondescript called something-or-other to a precocious French adolescent. The more personal, the more "revealing," the more embarassing such books are, the better readers like them. Needless to say, this obsession has not gone unsatisfied within recent memory. In view of such a spectacle, it can hardly discredit a reader to approach somewhat gingerly Orville Prescott's The Five Dollar Gold Piece: "The Development of a Point of View...