Word: canting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What do Macdonald's windmills have in common as the tiller sees them? Humbug. Cant. The special form of dishonesty that betrays itself as lack of style. Irving Howe once complained that if Jesus were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount tomorrow, "Dwight Macdonald would write that while 'Mr. Christ makes some telling points' they suffer from syntactical confusion and 'a woolly, pretentious style.' " Macdonald's answer: "Were the Sermon woolly," that would be "my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral...
...some ways this is the customary Murdoch blend of incipient farce, domestic tragicomedy and intellectual soap opera. Baroque pratfalls occur as usual, but neither the release of laughter nor the expected snicker of superiority (what odd and frightful people!) follows. Blaise knows that his psychological theorizing is mostly cant, yet he does have a knack for helping his patients. His visits to sharp-tongued Emily's apartment are mixed blessings-it is a hate nest in which the girl spends a good deal of time demanding money to have her teeth fixed. Harriet at first seems too kind...
...trooper (Clint Walker), outfitted for trapping his man properly: snowmobile, snowshoes and icy determination. ABC's Nakia (Robert Banyon Forster) is a hot-tempered Navajo deputy sheriff in New Mexico, evidently intended to be confused with both the cult-film heroics of Billy Jack and the mystical-religious cant of Kung...
...expenses, that he was a man of modest means whose wife did not wear mink but "a respectable Republican cloth coat," and that yes, there was one gift he was going to keep - a black and white cocker spaniel named Checkers. Though many found "the Checkers speech" full of cant and treacly sentimentality, the flood of favorable telegrams persuaded Eisenhower to execute a smart about-face. "You're my boy," he told Nixon...
...putdowns may be born of an admirable zeal to avoid mouthing hypocrisy and cant. On the other hand, cynicism-or la belle indifference, as Muggeridge would have it-can be a pose too. For the fact implicit in the very act of writing his autobiography is Muggeridge's assumption that the reader will find neither his life nor his account of it a waste of time. And he is right on both counts...