Word: boor
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...host thinks him a boor, vitriolic...
...adolescent growing up in Rome, Alessandra Corteggiani wonders how her parents ever happened to marry. Her father is a boor who unfailingly pours the sour wine of shop talk at the evening meal. Her mother is an amateur pianist with an outlook on life as romantic and melancholy as a Chopin nocturne. When Sandra's mother falls in love with an effete aristocrat, Papa Corteggiani crushes her with a phrase or two, e.g., "All women are . . . sluts," and she drowns herself in the Tiber...
Thomas Carlyle was often a boor, but never a bore. When he came courting Jane Welsh, he "made puddings in his teacup" and "scratched the fender dreadfully," causing her to say that he should be confined in "carpet-shoes and handcuffs" with only his "tongue . . . left at liberty...
...wedding night, Caroline discovers that her husband is a boor: he is "panting like a woodchopper felling young birches in the forests of Touraine." But since Georges is busy all day with politics, Young Birch Caroline soon gets a chance to branch out. Gaston de Salanches, for example, knows how to appreciate her. "My darling," he murmurs, "do you know that you have the most beautiful breasts in the world?" After a little more shoptalk, Caroline goes spinning "dizzily to unknown heights of ecstasy...
...three centuries after his death Bruegel was considered a vulgarian and a boor, almost beneath the notice of refined art lovers. He painted the world around 16th Century Antwerp just as he saw it, with a sharp reporter's eye for detail. He drew with the assurance (though not the delicacy) of DÜrer, and the informal air of his most complex pictures conceals a master-composer's iron hand. Love of life-the smooth along with the rough-was the driving force in his work; he scorned artiness and sentimentality...