Word: bumptiousness
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...ivory tower, with its feet planted firmly in the Manhattan market place. Marsh, a retiring 50-year-old chunk of a man, spends whole days at his studio window on the top floor, surveys the square below through a telescope. The caved-in bums, bundled up news vendors and bumptious, pneumatic-looking shopgirls that catch his eye are swiftly translated into notebook sketches and filed away in a steel cabinet...
Another Lunch. Melchior was not the only one prepared to rescue grand opera. In Manhattan, bustling little Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed-up Bizet in Carmen Jones, got front-page publicity with a proposal that wasn't as bumptious as it at first sounded. Five years ago, Billy had lunched with some Met board members, and made what Board Chairman George A. Sloan now gingerly refers to as "a number of helpful observations which were conveyed to our . . . management." Now Billy was again ready to be the Met's little helper...
...Scholar). After a dismal year as a prep-school Latin teacher, he taught English at Vanderbilt (with time out for World War I) for 23 years. Until the Fugitives woke him from his "dogmatic slumber," Ransom was a conventional teacher who took few pains to inspire his students. The bumptious crop of younger Fugitives stimulated him both as poet and teacher. Ransom, say his admirers in the Sewanee Review, did not try to dominate; he attained more enduring effects by the example of his intellectual decorum, the flavor of his conversation, the elegance of his craft...
Dapple-bearded little Philosopher C. E. M. Joad, 56, of the University of London, is familiar to British radio listeners as the wittily bumptious know-it-all of Brains Trust (BBC's recently ended version of Information Please). To bookish laymen and lecture-goers he is known as a racy popularizer of philosophy ("Philosophy should be about something that matters"). Clergymen once knew him as an annoying, church-baiting agnostic; at least one angry sermon has been preached on "God, Joad and the Devil...
...wealthy Rand pioneer's son, Erleigh had the financial backing; he soon picked up the mining experience. In 1933, he helped Abraham Sundel Hersov form the Anglo-Transvaal Investment Co., Ltd., and together they made a killing in Rand mines. But "Bob" Hersov was too cautious for bumptious, erratic Norby Erleigh. By 1935 Erleigh, then 32, had broken away from Anglovaal, and he had made his first million. He had also lost all desire to quit...