Word: quaint
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...discoveries is huge (6 ft. 4 in.) Trinidad-born Christian Holder, 21. Blessed with a lean, rubbery face and with limbs of astonishing flexibility, Holder has a good actor's ability to turn his towering physique to dramatic effect. As the puppet villain in Petrouchka, he presents the quaint spectacle of a black performing in blackface and shows a notable gift for deadpan comedy. His terrorizing, primitive presence as Death in Kurt Jooss's antiwar tract, The Green Table, dominates the stage and sends chills through even a sophisticated dance audience...
...allowed in to question the general satisfaction and industriousness that Miss Westman sees as characterizing the Harvard community. Around the turn of the century, writers used to visit the slums of New York in similar fashion; off they would go in search of the picturesque, the strange and the quaint, and finding it, they would entirely ignore the poverty and disease with which it struggled. Miss Westman, however unwittingly on her part, offers justification to those who would have the city and its universities drive out the poor and transient in hopeless attempts to return to simpler, pleasanter times...
...more recent times there has been commerce-some bad, some good-between radicals and liberals. A generation ago, some liberals allowed themselves to be used as fronts for Stalinists, who at the time were regarded (and regarded themselves) as radicals, a notion that seems quaint today, when the remaining Stalinists are usually referred to as "conservative Communists." It is also true that American liberals over the years have picked up many a successful idea from self-proclaimed radicals, notably from the Socialist Party platform...
Even in this age of instant obsolescence, fashionable slang wears out faster than most commodities. What is very lively in Kansas City today may brand a user as quaint in Manhattan or the Bay Area. It thus becomes periodically necessary, as French Poet Stéphane Mallarmé once suggested, donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu -to purify the dialect of the tribe...
...most businessmen treat slum-dwellers-they reinforce the image of the Square they wish to disspell. Moreover, further repression of an already militant group can only ensure continuing riots. And if the merchants feel that filling the Square with police is really the way back to the quaint comfortable Harvard Square that they say they want, then they have left rationality completely behind in their panic...