Word: archness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spookily charming, mordantly funny, even sexy in a sulphur-scented way. Writers have been especially beguiled, from Marlowe and Milton to Shaw and Stephen Vincent Benet. Indeed, while putting God on display as a character is normally a guarantee of literary disaster, it sometimes seems that stories about his arch-opposite just can't miss. Presumably there is a sound theological basis for all this: virtue could hardly be considered virtuous if it were also indisputably fun, while a patently offensive Old Nick would have trouble procuring the ruin of souls...
...with a boyfriend, he caroms between Noel Coward worldliness and Edward Albee combat, hinting at suicide, half attempting murder. In earlier versions of the play, the bloody pathos of opera found a parallel: the abandoned man stabbed his lover, then held him in a last embrace. That ending felt arch. This one feels anticlimactic, void of release. So does the end of an affair, an event McNally chronicles with specific detail and authentic, universal pain...
...strong Panama Defense Forces of two dubious propositions: first, that the country's political opposition will eviscerate the PDF if it comes to power; second, that he alone represents the military's best interests. The soldiers, says a foreign diplomat, "view Noriega as the keystone in an arch; without him the arch will crumble...
...throw all of that away now. The real Harvard cross country season starts this afternoon, when Harvard meets up with arch-rivals Yale and Princeton at HYP's at the Springdale Golf Club in Princeton...
...destroyed sixteen West Virginia towns along Buffalo Creek, along with 125 of their residents. It's not just that Pittston got off the hook for the Buffalo Creek catastrophe with a miniscule $13.5 million settlement by allegedly using its influence with the corrupt administration of former West Virginia Gov. Arch A. Moore, Jr. It's not just that Pittston has been cited for 45 violations of labor relations laws in the last seven months...