Word: arrant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just when the place had begun to empty out and quiet down, a family celebrating the end of another hot night on the town came in modeling green doubleknit leisure suits and singing "Happy Birthday" as they lost their last shreds of sobriety. Hard on their heels came an arrant MIT professor jauntily sporting a computer logic manual and a beautiful women some 20 years his junior...
This is the gaudy tightrope mode of Wallace Stevens, and few poets since Stevens have been able to escape the pit of arrant gibberish that yawns below. In his eighth volume, Ashbery once again proves that he can. What is striking in his poems is not the absence of simple semantic logic but the implication of a rationality that lies just out of reach. Ashbery makes clear his impatience with simple verisimilitude...
...always dismaying to see a gifted actor or actress destroy a well-earned reputation through arrant self-indulgence. In the past two or three years, Britain's Maggie Smith has embarked on this melancholy course, and the dispiriting results have been on livid display on the stage of Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theater for the past five weeks. Four years ago on this very stage, in The Beaux Stratagem, Maggie Smith spoke English as if it were the eighth wonder of the world. Today, as Amanda in Private Lives, she whines, gibbers and snorts with all the grace...
...MOST OF US the term "infanticide" is an anachronism. Except perhaps for the few widely publicized sensational tales of psychotic parents or arrant child molesters murdering helpless children, the term connotes the second most common pre-twentieth century method of birth control. (The first, of course, was celibacy...
What he has to say about me is arrant falsehood. He writes that the father of my colleague Patrice Higonnet helped me gain access to important French archives and he implies that because of this alleged assistance I supported Professor Higonnet's appointment to a permanent post in the Department of History Mr. Higonnet pere has never helped me in any connection, so that I cannot possibly have been in fluenced by his favor to support the appointment of his son, as The Crimson itself recognizes...