Word: stiff
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Once upon a time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants-Puritans and the children of Puritans-clamped a code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model-the only model-for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability...
...labor intensive, thus keeping employment levels high. Another new tax would be based on the life of industrial products. A consumer buying a machine-made product that lasts one year would pay a 100% tax on it, while a product built to last 100 years would be taxfree. Stiff as such measures may seem now, the Ecologist says, they will avoid imposing infinitely greater hardships on future generations of British citizens...
...doughty Clarence Campbell, the image-conscious president of the National Hockey League, that free-swinging fiasco at the end of last season moved him to deliver a few stiff blows of his own. Slapping both teams with an unprecedented total of $16,550 in fines, he declared that their version of the Ice Follies "only makes us look stupid. We have considerable correspondence in our files protesting such behavior from grown men while young boys are watching on television...
...have the same intention. The sum effect is, inevitably, absurd: for De Chirico has no more talent for illusionism than the average calendar artist. It becomes parody-and when De Chirico is not parodying Rubens, Tintoretto or Rembrandt, he parodies himself, as in The Sadness of Springtime, 1970, producing stiff, cluttered repaints of his "metaphysical" period. But the tension has gone. One has seen the originals-except when the "originals" are recent products, for it is an open secret in the Italian art world that De Chirico has painted numerous works supposedly from 1916-17 over the past few decades...
...think it was a little stiff and stern; yet it is difficult to work in a change of pace in an eight-minute speech. You can't very well start with jokes and in eight minutes get into a serious subject. But with respect to the basic question of what an announcement speech of this kind should be, the announcement was what I wanted it to be. I felt it should be a clear signal of where my priorities lie, where my commitment is, and of my determination to pursue it. In this sense, I wanted...