Word: captiousness
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...began over a year ago, when Auckland Investment Banker Michael Fay overturned 30 years of tradition and challenged the San Diego Yacht Club to a one-on-one race, instead of joining a regatta planned for 1991. When a New York State Supreme Court upheld Fay's captious interpretation of the rules, San Diego countered in kind by saying regulations permitted it to defend in a $ catamaran, a multihulled craft usually speedier than a monohull...
...rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer and Surf Nazis Must Die. You could catch Jean-Luc Godard in a typically impish auto-da-fe. This year the Peter Pan of enfants terribles presented a captious, grating version of King Lear, starring both Norman Mailer and Burgess Meredith as Lear and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. Godard, who later boasted that he had never read the play, seemed determined to accomplish what the banks and an indifferent movie public have not quite yet achieved: to bankrupt the Cannon...
...decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or try to issue the book in a more watered-down form. Salinger naturally had no comment on the court's decision. Holden Caulfield had already spoken for him, after all. In the opening lines of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger's captious hero warns the reader, "I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography." And not going to let anyone else tell it either...
...Chess is in U.S. record stores, competing for attention with Lloyd Webber's latest composition, Requiem. In one Tower Records outlet in Manhattan, a captious music fan has written on the Requiem place mark: WATCH OUT, WEBBER--TIM RICE'S MIDDLE NAME IS SALIERI. Rice laughs off the barb; he disclaims any hostility toward his former colleague, even as he stifles persistent rumors of a reunion. "Andrew and I had eight or ten years together that were enormously successful and great fun. But now it's been eight or ten years since we wrote our last show, Evita...
Still, fielding darts from captious intellectuals was not quite the equivalent of facing bullets or a mugger's knife. Why then, ponders Podhoretz, did so many liberals let themselves be intimidated? He devotes much of his book to searching for an explanation and concludes that intellectuals suffered a failure of nerve. When confronted, they would not fight for their beliefs, especially if the opposition came from the left, which was supposed to be on the side of justice and humanity. They would not defend the integrity of thought against crude up-against-the-wall sloganeering...