Word: amateurly
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David Carkeet's first novel, Double Negative, was a murder mystery in which the only witness to a crime was a toddler who had not yet mastered standard speech. The story's amateur detective was a philologist who unmasked the criminal when he cracked the child's babbled code. Carkeet's next novel, The Greatest Slump of All Time, told of a major league baseball team whose polyglot members one by one lapsed into clinical depression. Although they kept winning, they doubted the value of victory when it failed to make them happy, and found themselves facing mid-life moral...
...with a circulation of more than 60,000. Graham zigzags across the country blithely suggesting that the U.S. could build SDI (he loathes the term Star Wars) with today's off-the-shelf technology. While Graham may be the most zealous of the pro-SDi salesmen, he is an amateur compared with its leading pitchman, Ronald Reagan. The pro-SDI forces count on the President's uncanny ability to convince the public that good old American hard work and know-how can make any dream come true...
...shallow people, endowing them with no heroism but great vulnerability and charm. Pownall, 47, has plucked out the essentials from Austen. There is the tug-of-war wedlock of the middle-aged Bennets, she (Marge Redmond) a worrier and a conniver, he (Richard Kiley) a detached and almost enigmatic amateur scholar. There is the frustrating courtship dance between the Bennets' clever, winsome daughter Elizabeth (Jane Kaczmarek) and the rich Mr. Darcy (Peter Gallagher), both too proud to recognize the inevitability of their union. And there is the misguided infatuation of the Bennets' dim daughter Lydia (Jane Fleiss) with a handsome...
...self-proclaimed defender of widows and orphans, this case arraying one against the other is a test of her emotional fortitude. She had frequent run-ins last week with attorneys for the widow, and during a legal huddle before the bench, she characterized the courtroom technique of one as "Amateur time!" in a voice that could be heard across the room...
...wedding-reception aesthetic is exactly the point. Wedding receptions, like Dancing, are carefully constructed hipness-free zones--places where it's more fun to be a fool on the floor than cool on the sidelines. Where Idol is about show-biz amateurs trying to go pro, Dancing is about show-biz pros turning amateur (there's not even a cash prize) and daring to be amateurish. Dance, for most of us, is about letting go, being inept and not caring. And Dancing, from its laughed-off missteps to its militantly dated production values, is that sentiment lustily, dorkily embodied...