Word: quaintly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American will do the opposite; it's all in the vowels. Stylistically the difference between the two countries is the difference between Rex Harrison and Gary Cooper-a difference that is generally played to the hilt by both sides so that they may simultaneously find each other quaint and horrifying, each regarding his counterpart as if he had never seen such a specimen before. Put crudely, one is a nation of shopkeepers and the other a nation of shopping malls; different size, different look, but the same goods...
...dream is an old one, a dream that smacks of the optimism of the Enlightenment. Faith in the power of truth and knowledge holds a special place in American public life as much as in modern Jewish history. There is something anachronistic and quaint about Gavin's vision: What other archaeologist has such ambitions...
...high rhetoric. The British fleet steamed out of Portsmouth. To relieve Gordon at Khartoum? To lift the siege of Lucknow? The British were vividly time traveling. The ministers of the ex-empire took a bracing, almost archaically principled stand-a position that itself seemed an exercise in nostalgia: quaint, perhaps, but admirable. Honor was mentioned. The imperial ships set sail like positrons on an expedition into reverse time...
...Getting a taste of being an international city may raise our expectations culturally and aesthetically." Roberts' hopeful and boosterism sounds almost quaint: it has been at least a dozen years since World's Fairs -grand, unself-conscious celebrations of progress and technology - were right in step with the Zeitgeist. But Knoxville, a latecomer to urbanity, is excited anyway. Even John Austin, ambivalent about the enterprise, appreciates the hoopla. Says he: "We'd still be a backwater town on the banks of the Tennessee River without the fair." -By Kurt Andersen...
...fact, nudging Washington was the point of the vote. With an almost quaint, civics-class formality, the antinuclear proposition called on the state legislature to pass a resolution directing Vermont's three-man congressional delegation to urge President Reagan to propose a mutual nuclear arms freeze with the Soviet Union. On Friday in the Vermont state legislature, the house passed the resolution, 103 to 26. Similar measures have been approved by six other states, and town meetings in Maine and New Hampshire are about to address the issue. In the Senate this week, Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts...