Word: canting
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...sodden cant, no cliche of therapeutic culture goes unused. If we are at the point where any attempt at aesthetic discrimination can be read as blaming the victim, is there any use in choosing anything over anything else -- or in holding a Biennial...
Even if the average Square-dweller has so far escaped some pimply outcast's displaced frustration, no one can avoid the hawkers of Square Deal and other useless pieces of paper. Clogging the already insufficient sidewalk space, they shove their worthless dreck into your face, screaming an annoying cant the whole time...
...show gives Leguizamo an actor's tour de force. He plays all six roles, ranging from the piggy schoolboy Miggy to bone-dumb Desert Storm veteran Crazy Willie to their ditsy mother Gladyz, a rare drag part shaped with candor rather than cant. He also depicts a surgically handicapped brother who has been shunted away to an institution; a bleach-blond brother in deep denial about everything from his origins to his sexuality; and the clan patriarch, feared by all the others as an epic bully but visible in the final sequence as just a hollow never-was clinging...
Costas' tightly formatted half time shows often allow sports figures to get away with bitter cant and shameless self-promotion. It's a gig Costas is eager to outgrow. During the Games he is determined to curtail Olympic hype, and he intends to refrain pointedly from calling every upcoming event "exciting" and every confrontation "critical." Even with the tape delays necessitated by time differences, Costas will cover events as they happen, a high-wire act that will show off his considerable ad-lib talents...
Carlin is unfairly pigeonholed, however, as a leftover '60s radical. The real targets of his satire are cant and cliche, phoniness and self- righteousness, wherever he finds them. At the beginning of a 1990 HBO concert, he rattled off a list of New Age terms banned from his vocabulary: "I will not 'share' anything with you. I will not 'relate' to you, and you will not 'identify' with me. I will give you no 'input,' and I will expect no 'feedback.' " Euphemisms that cloud our thinking are another favorite topic: "Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue, false...