Word: arrant
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...evenhanded," he said. At a press conference, McCloskey added: "We have to respect the views of our Jewish citizens, but not be controlled by them." Morris Casuto, San Diego director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, promptly denounced McCloskey's statements as "arrant nonsense" and "an insult to the Jewish community...
...something to watch. In air and bearing, she possesses regal command. Her arrant good looks, particularly those thrush-startled violet eyes, fix all other eyes upon her. On glimpsing her, Poe might have written his poem "To Helen" apostrophizing the most beguiling beauty of the ancient world. QE3 (as someone recently nicknamed Taylor) conjures up that grace and grandeur...
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...