Word: arrant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sexism is their target and battle cry -as racism is the blacks'. They regard 20th century America as a rigid, male-dominated society which, deliberately or more often unconsciously, perpetuates arrant inequities between men and women-in pay, kinds of jobs and, more subtly, self-expression. Women, they say, are constantly put down by the ads that ask "Does she ... or doesn't she?" or proclaim "You've come a long way, baby," because, of all things, she has supposedly got her own cigarette. The militants abhor Playboy as well as most women's magazines, which...
...circumstances." Dimbleby seemed unperturbed. He said that he had deliberately set out "to get behind the platitudinous surface and pick up the more truthful reality. If the Queen opens Parliament, all right, that's straight ceremony. But when President and Prime Minister meet, it's arrant nonsense that it be treated with deference...
...Your remark about Humphrey's strategy ("he seems to play both sides of the fence or simply straddle it") [Aug. 30] aroused the Edward Lear in me: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey Is guilty of arrant mugwumpery: Now a dove, then hawk, With his fast doubletalk He cozens nonthinkers with trumpery...
...adventure story, Dark of the Sun is a workmanlike display worthy of a Ph.D. in demolition warfare. As a vignette of the Simba rebellion, which it purports to be, it is arrant nonsense. The Congolese national army, which it depicts as heroic, was in fact undisciplined and corrupt. The Simba rebels, portrayed as raping terrorists, were in fact relatively disciplined. Held in thrall by a powerful black dawa (magic), the Simbas were forbidden to steal from the whites or even lay hands on a white woman-whose touch, they believed, was evil...
...American Dream. It is no mean achievement to have made the next-to-worst novel Norman Mailer ever wrote into a movie even more embarrassing than the book. Much more embarrassing, in fact. Mailer's novel was an ardent-arrant attempt to reset Crime and Punishment in contemporary America, substituting for Raskolnikov a sort of Supernorman. Censoring both the author's ideas and his scatological eloquence, the film script turns the story into a cliche-stocked, ho-humdrum thriller about a TV star (Stuart Whitman) who murders his rich-bitch wife (Eleanor Parker) in Reel...