Word: blockheaded
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...saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. When George II took the throne in 1727, Savage wrote a poem eulogizing him, but typically made the mistake of praising George I whom George II hated. This was the pattern for most of his mistakes, for diplomatically he was a blockhead. Pope seemed to fascinate him, and together they attacked the men who had once been Savage's literary friends. Here too he made enemies of those who would have supported...
...prettiest scenes are those between Fisby and the uniformly lovable natives, who first offer him gifts and finally devo tion. The funniest scenes are those between Fisby and his hidebound, befuddled blockhead of a colonel (well played by Paul Ford). The most individual scenes are those in which David Wayne, as a native interpreter full of peasant wisdom, comes engagingly before the curtain and comments on the story...
Knaves & Skeletons. If places crinkled Carlyle's nose, so did most people, famed or humble. Publishers were "consummate knaves," and his own "a blockhead." He found Charles Lamb "a miserable, drink-besotted, spindle-shanked skeleton of a body, whose 'humour' as it is called, seemed to me neither more nor less than a fibre of genius shining thro' positive delirium and crackbrainedness." Robert Browning was "loudish and talkative beyond need." Even Emerson, who boosted Carlyle's American reputation and mailed him his U.S. royalties, irked the grumpy Scot with his perennial good temper and "unsubduable...
...opera bouffe, the novel is first-rate. Tereso swaggers in appropriate blockhead style; Fausta's romances, high & low, are drawn with Moravia's usual skill for capturing the flavors of sensuality; Perro is a neat reincarnation of the Machiavellian villain. As satire, the book fails. The true satirist's fierce involvement seems to be missing. Stendhal, despite his air of urbane weariness, kept scoring points against Bourbonism. Moravia seems to write from no particular point of view...
Your editorial entitled "Unseen Spectators" is a wilderness of nonsense. "Since debating is primarily a spectacle, it is purposeless without spectators," it says. Harvard debating does not attract spectators, and "the result has been the forensic feebleness illustrated last week by the double loss to Yale." This is blockhead thinking...