Word: ado
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...Ado about Nothing. To a majority of Chicago students, the sit-in seemed like much ado about nothing. The university's administration, like that of most U.S. schools, gives grade information to draft boards only on the request of the students concerned. And if a student could not thus prove himself a deferrable brilliant scholar, starting May 14, he could take the Selective Service System's Qualification Test, which many high school seniors could pass. The Chicago sit-in leaders held that the university, by not refusing cooperation with draft boards, is implicitly backing the war in Viet...
...much ado about little. The of fice at stake was Oxford's chair of poetry, which, as one commentator observed, offers "no power, little work and less money." Robert Graves, the retiring incumbent, picked up the annual $980 the professorship provides by delivering three lectures within eight weeks last year. Reason: for tax purposes, Graves is registered as a company in Liechtenstein and can only spend three months a year in Britain. Neither of this year's candidates-American Robert Lowell and Briton Edmund Blunden-bothered to campaign for the seat...
SHAKESPEARE: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (3 LPs; RCA Victor). In Shakespeare's funniest social comedy, everything depends on the speed and sparkle of the witty duels between Beatrice and Benedick, played here by two fast-rising British stars, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, whose voices are whirling kaleidoscopes. That young theatrical iconoclast, Franco Zeffirelli (creator of a successful beatnik Hamlet), directed this National Theater of Britain production, which one critic called as lurid and animated as a Superman comic. The performance on the recording is robust but never bumptious...
...analogy with Pinocchio. The Italian name is properly spelled Petruccio, and the Shakespeare Folio made it Petruchio precisely to provide a phonetic spelling for English-speaking actors. Thus it should be pronounced with a ch-sound as in "church." (The identical situation obtains with the name Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing.) Furthermore, Shrew's verse requires, except in three or four lines, that Petruchio be trisyllabic (just as it is in Italian...
When in Rome, she does as she always does. There were some boos after the first act of a gala opening-night Norma in 1958, and Soprano Maria Callas stomped out without further ado. So the Rome Opera canceled her contract for three additional performances. Their mistake. The reason for her hasty exit, said La Callas, was a sore throat, and a Roman court that examined her medical certificates agreed. The opera management now has to honor her original contract and pay the diva $2,800 for the operas she didn't sing. With Callas, even silence is golden...