Word: procrustean
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Through Manhattan's Grand Central Palace last week crowded 20,000 of the nation's beauty-shop operators to inspect their trade's new tools. What they saw made some of them wonder if they hadn't wandered by mistake into a house of Procrustean horror...
...toppling over backwards in his effort to play no favorites, to find and set forth the essential good in every splinter of Christianity. But the effort is well made and to better purpose than merely striving to please. In opposition to those who would force all Protestants into a Procrustean bed of "unity" (as the Christian Century's fiery Charles Clayton Morrison would), Author Hedley sees no innate evil in sectarianism as such. To him each denomination is a division in the mighty army of Christ, bearing different designations, emblems and proud traditions. Says...
...Result? In the midst of all this gloom, the U.A.W.'s smart, redheaded Walter P. Reuther stepped up with a typically procrustean solution. Could G.M., said he, with a meaning look at the entire industry, prove that it could not grant the U.A.W. increase and still sell its cars at 1942 prices with a "fair" profit? If it could, then the U.A.W. would modify its demands...
...gull had to do was lie down on the box, strap his head to the fixed post, his feet to the adjustable one; when he turned a wheel on the side, he could stretch his legs and hear the joints crack. The promotion copy claimed that this Procrustean bed would cure "every conceivable condition...
...Only of one thing can we be certain, and that is, that to apply the Procrustean formula suggested by the Association's pending proposals is to cut off here a foot and there a head, leaving broken and bleeding the processes of administrative law which still hold so many hopes for a better realization of the eternal promise of American life...