Word: arrant
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...depths of his soul a sour-grapes complex, Balzac, for example, receives the Prix d'Excellence for six heroines adored anywhere between forty and forty-seven, and for one beloved at fifty-five. Any author who has a candidate over thirty receives a Good Mark, but conspuez those arrant sentimentalists whose damsels begin counting their scalps at the unripe age of eighteen and even less...
...with a few brief sentences she persuades the testy Robert de Baudricourt to grant her soldiers and a horse to carry her to the Dauphin closeted at Chinon. Her recognition of the latter in the crowded throne room, his conversion to her standard follow. Shaw then revels in an arrant trumpery when he changes before your eyes the course of a contrary wind?the Maid's "miracle" on joining the French forces before Orl?...
...during the Revolution; thus the fortunes of Scaramouche unfold. Unfortunately the quiet talents of that excellent actor Sidney Blackmer fit wretchedly the heroic velvet and sash of the hero. When fiery flame is needed he only smoulders pleasantly. Otherwise the cast and the production are considerably better than the arrant melodrama deserves...
...minutes before this publication seemed for the moment a journalistic miracle. Closer inspection revealed a badly written story of the vaguest and most general character. No mention of the lengths or time of victory was made. Furthermore, the Harvard crew was credited with the smoother, prettier form-a statement arrant in its stupidity...
When Victor Hugo, in his most dramatic vein, told the tale of a cannon that came loose from its moorings and plunged unchecked about the deck of a vessel at sea, dealing destruction to the crew, critics crowed right and left that he was the most arrant Romanticist, and that the scene was too far-fetched to carry conviction. Another of his most famous passages met with the same scepticism--the under-water battle with an octopus. Yet within six months, both of these incidents have been performed on the stage of everyday life. Last fall the newspapers told...