Word: captious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...captious might complain that there are no trained seals in the show, but there is everything else. Two or three of the acts are very good: Walter Nilsson cavorting madly on a monocycle, Hal Sherman pantomimes dancing adroitly while looking as awkward as Charlie Chaplin. But most of the acts are very bad: all the skits, a Turkish harem number, a roguish sister act performed by two girls each of whom looks like the other's mother...
...Donnell). Some of the humor gets grey hairs: The tenth time grandma upbraids grandpa for swearing is scarcely as funny as the first. The narrative, toward the end, begins to stagger and stutter. And Mr. Brink (Frank Conroy) stays up in the apple tree long enough to make the captious wonder if it isn't time for the leaves to turn. But that may be because the tree looks (as grandpa would put it) so goddamn natural...
...freed by the gangster because she was a captious blond...
...this new biography, the best so far, the biographer sets himself to prove that modern critics who belittle Gibbon's history commit an error equal to Boswell's when he snarled that "Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow," or to Dr. Johnson's when that captious fellow club-member implied that it was Gibbon who had ruined Rome. Ingenious as well as admiring, Biographer Low makes no attempt to turn ugly-duckling Gibbon into a swan: the greatness of The Decline and Fall is dramatized more effectively by contrast with the fussy mite...
...Ways & Means Committee sat down to do its constitutional duty. But neither buzzard-bald Chairman Robert L. Doughton nor any of his colleagues were fooled by these solemn delegations of power. They knew that whatever bill they recommended and the House passed would, as always, be rewritten by a captious Senate. This relieved North Carolina's Doughton of much responsibility, more brain work. His chief job was not to make a tax bill but to make haste...