Word: boorishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nixon's memories of Nikita Khrushchev were vivid. He was "boorish, crude, brilliant, ruthless, potentially rash, with a terrible inferiority complex." He would put on a "big macho act to prove that he was ahead of everybody and everything." Part of the act was his "air of being just a common, peasantlike person... with a sloppy hat and a collar that wouldn't be too clean...
Jones never seemed thrown or slowed down by the loss of critical approval. Indeed, he never indulged in the public pouts one expects of celebrated literary types. In Paris, apart from a couple of boorish flashes of temper, he lived an abundant life and made his strikingly craggy face familiar around the boulevards. He also continued to write and yearn for literary immortality. Even when he did gripe about reviewers, one could wonder whether he really cared what they were saying-or even quite understood. "They just said I was a bad writer, bad grammar, blah, blah, blah," he told...
Although Darwin was a man of unsurpassed personal charm, his enthusiasm for sports and the pugnacious attitude that allowed him to become a championship golfer in his own right, added a certain lovable but disarming, and at times boorish, intensity to his personality. The passion that infuses all of Darwin's writings can perhaps best be traced to Ryde's insight that "every game he watched or took part in assumed the proportions of an heroic encounter...
Some of Simon's callers are merely nuisances: a boorish top-floor tenant (John Christopher Jones), a boozily aggressive littérateur, his girl friend who is soon enough making a stripped-to-the-waist play for a book contract. Others have more powerful claims on him: a brother stunted by failure, an old school enemy in suicidal despair because Simon has casually alienated the affections of the woman he loves, a wife driven into a dismal affair by Simon's emotional sterility. As they attack Simon from many directions, their function is to reveal the seamless perfection...
...from the Duke of Windsor to Joe DiMaggio, from Chief Justice Earl Warren to Mobster Frank Costello. Generous and impulsive, he once dropped more than $60,000 on a World Series bet, and would carry down-and-out customers on the cuff for months on end. Master of the boorish putdown, he called his famous customers "creeps" and "crumb-bums." "If he doesn't insult you, he doesn't love you," Actor Pat O'Brien once said. "And if he doesn't love you, then you have missed a chunk of life...