Word: arrantly
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...just a portrait of a hypochondriac; nor is it just another volley in Moliere's life-long campaign against Baroque medical quackery and incompetence. The main theme of the play is the struggle between fraud and stupidity--a warning against too great a trust in alleged experts and arrant professionalism. Of the two dozen or so personages in the piece, only two are natural and honest human beings. The rest are all hypocrites or bluffers. Healthy Argan pretends to be riddled with illness; his inheritance-eyeing wife Beline protests familial affection; the small daughter Louison feigns death; Doctor Diafoirus maintains...
...moving his chair a little closer to the Common Room fire, "but I don't like to be pushed. As a matter of fact, despite my reticence, I think it's safe to say that I've had my share of success with the opposite sex." This was an arrant lie, of course, but we listened, interested...
...noticeable absence of morality contained in Dr. Kinsey's comedies on sexual behavior were their main weakness. So it is with those who condone test-tube babies and are shocked when told they are doing something immoral. Northwestern University's Dr. Irving Stein talks arrant nonsense when he implies that artificial insemination is moral merely because people are asking to have babies in that manner . . . The whole idea of a Christian marriage is destroyed when a wife attempts conception by "relations" with a man other than her husband, whether it be in actual physical union or by artificial...
...Burning, with its medieval echoes and broomstick leaps of witchcraft and romance, Fry could be simultaneously prankster and poet, could spoof the very verse he spouted. But Venus Observed is modern, sophisticated, drawing-room bred, .and its ironies, at times, stare down its extravagancies as arrant trespassers...
Comedy becomes slapstick, courage becomes arrant braggadocio, and even the celebrated nose assumes absurd proportions under Ferrer's touch. He forgets that the one extreme about which Cyrano's character revolves is that of unswerving devotion to a personal code of honor. By removing this one characteristic of universal appeal from Cyrano, Ferrer has also taken away the element of audience self-identification, perhaps the most important aspect of the play. This is not to say that Ferrer's acting is not often superb. It is. In the balcony and convent scenes, he extracts the utmost from Rostand's brilliant...