Word: bumptiousness
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Free-Choice Shtik. A former assistant dean at Columbia University's engineering school, Barr arrived at Dalton with a dim view of "orthodox" progressive education's emphasis on emotional development. Bumptious and bright, by turns pompous and ingenuous, Barr implemented the trustees' decisions to make Dalton's all-girl high school coed and to more than double the size of the school, to 1,000. The expansion permitted seven kinds of science, ten languages, 20 English courses. "My shtik" Barr said, "is freedom of choice for the students whenever possible...
...opted for bombast rather than character development, scope instead of dramatic tension. The time is 1916, and Britain's thin red line of empire is being besieged on two sides by the Boches and the Irish Republican Army. Rosy is a willful, discontented lass who scorns the bumptious town boys and chooses by default the widowed, middle-aged teacher. Shaughnessy warns her: "I only taught you about Byron and Beethoven and Captain Blood. I'm not one of them fellows meself." They marry anyway, and her wedding night is your standard virgin v. tired stag disappointment. Neither...
...distorts some of the facts of contemporary Greece to suit its own purposes, it succeeds in conveying much of the stifling atmosphere of that country today. The insular patriotism, simple-mindedness and dictatorial methods of the colonels are devastatingly captured, if in caricature. Their bumptious puritanism is neatly depicted in the film's opening sequence in which the military brass are assembled for indoctrination. A rightist general compares the disease afflicting the grapes of Greece with the sickness assaulting the body politic: party factionalism, overfree speech, alien ideas. The military, he announces, must serve as the antibodies to repel...
Take two parts of insight and three parts of gall. Combine with chunks of meaty research, season with flammable forecasts and serve sizzling on a sharpened verbal skewer. The recipe describes the concoctions of Economist Pierre Rinfret, 46, the engaging, bumptious and increasingly conspicuous purveyor of advice to corporations, investment bankers, Presidents and other politicians...
Perfumed Fringes. Still, this is one French Revolution that is too much fun for anyone to lose his head over critical objections. The film's condemned premise is that the revolution could have been averted. The Duke de Sisi of Corsica and a bumptious farmer have their respective sets of twin boys mixed up by. a harried doctor. One unmatched pair (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland) become the murderous, exquisitely aberrant "Corsican Brothers," existing on the perfumed fringes of the aristocracy. The other two (also Wilder and Sutherland) grow up to be swinish revolutionary hangers...