Word: banter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tireless Name-Dropper Elsa Maxwell, reporting for the Hearstpapers her latest encounters with the well-known, recorded some brief banter with a sly curmudgeon of old. "I once asked Bernard Shaw which was his favorite Shakespearean comedy," wrote Elsa, "and he replied. 'Othello.' 'But Othello is not a comedy,' I told him. 'It's a tragedy.' Mr. Shaw quipped, 'Any play whose plot hangs on a lady's handkerchief must be a comedy...
Miss Ryder, though history will remember her as the girl with the aquamarine eyelids, is better. She has the appropriate freshness of face and figure, except for the eyelids, and is good at times; like Kulukundis, she is better at remonstrance than banter. But there came a time when her voice recalled the sound a tape recorder makes when played backwards at a high speed; fresh, perhaps, but unsettling...
...boys arrive and leave slightly before children in nearby schools, are escorted to subways by a teacher, who pays for their rides out of public funds. Both schools require neat dress; the Brooklyn unit even insists on ties. In the classroom, the boys usually keep up a cocky, running banter with their teacher. But they can talk with the weariness of old age about their problems. "I'm a troublemaker," said one eighth grader. "I started everything that ever happened...
...play uses a classic stage form, the brittle conversation piece. In terms of smart brushes and insulting banter, this has its good points; but seldom were a classic action and a classic method so mismated. 'Stage struggles over a will make for melodrama or serious drama, farce or sardonic comedy, for banged fists, shaking fingers or skinny claws-but not for the playfully brandished rapier. Fencing verbally, the brothers sometimes neatly pink each other, even achieve an occasional moral louche. But they use buttoned foils on synthetic flesh. Nor, in place of human drama, is there any real psychological...
...Anne Bancroft is a warmhearted, racy-tongued, Bronx-to-Bohemia floater whom he meets at a party. All her life she has given too freely; he all his life has taken. Shuttling between their shabby little flats, they carry on a love affair in sickness and in health, in banter and in woe, bridging a cultural and temperamental divide better than they can blot out a memory of marriage...