Word: blowhard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Squalling Grammarians. Traditional translations make much of Homer's epithets (Hera is "white-armed"; Odysseus generally "crafty"). Graves uses them sparingly, and sometimes ironically. The gods are treated with something less than respect; Zeus is a blowhard who hardly ever means what he says, and Hera, his wife, might be a garden-club president. When Zeus, who favors the Trojans, remarks that Hera protects the Greeks as if they were her own bastards, she replies pertly: "Revered Son of Cronus, what a thing to say!" Cartoonist Ronald Searle's illustrations wittily support Graves's wry treatment...
Instead of the deputy, a stranger (Burt Lancaster) comes to supper-a rip-roaring young buckaroo, part prophet and part pitchman, with the natural force of a Kansas twister and much the same blowhard approach. The stranger soon has the house in an uproar and Lizzie's head in a whirl with his promise to bring the rain their crops need, and with his threat to awaken the love her heart fears and longs for. Price: $100. "Electrify the cold front!" he cries. "Neutralize the warm front! Barometricize the tropopause!" Says Lizzie: "Bunk!" But the rainmaker has an answer...
Steiner's platoon is a batch of human putty. Among them are: trusty, pipe-smoking Schnurrbart, a born second-in-command; Dietz, a mamma's boy with the puppy-dog look; Dorn, an overage misclassified philosophy professor; Kern, a blowhard rookie; and Zoll, a pornography-minded tub of lard. "Anyone who gives out is going to be left behind," Steiner warns them. When their rations give out, Steiner tells them to eat tree bark, but he also shares the last of his own rations. When Dietz is critically wounded in a night skirmish, it is Steiner who holds...
...week's drama was partially redeemed by CBS's Best of Broadway, which revived George Kelly's 1924 Broadway hit, The Show-Off, as a starring vehicle for Comedian Jackie Gleason. As Aubrey Piper, a vainglorious blowhard who enchants his wife but drives her family daffy, Gleason was playing a role not too far removed from his own Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners. He posed and postured as man of affairs, thinker, dude and cocksure authority on everything from high finance to socialism. As his embattled mother-in-law, Hollywood's Thelma (Rear Window) Ritter...
...Gump family have been galumphing along in their daily comic strip for over 30 years. They first appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Chinless, blowhard Andy Gump, his long-suffering, last-wording wife Min, and their billionaire Uncle Bim became as familiar to millions of newspaper readers as the neighbors, and Andy's anguished cry for help ("O, Mini") was a byword of the '30s. When a minor character called Mary Gold was heartlessly killed off (the first U.S. comic-strip figure to die), thousands of readers protested...