Word: causticity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nearly as playful and adventurous as a filmmaker as Mars is a character. He takes chances and willfully escapes from standard film conventions. Lee inserts a sequence that illustrates Nola's caustic commentary on men. Ten men deliver their most persuasive come-on lines for the camera. One winner, for instance, suggests "Hey baby, let's do the wild thing." The laughter of the audience tends to drown out some of the lines but Lee surely will have his timing down by his next project. Another small misstep comes with a fantasy dance sequence shot in color in the middle...
Perhaps the most prescient thinking behinddecisions to cover or not to cover went on insidethe editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal.After publishing a caustic preview of the 350th inmid-August, the paper has no plans, barring anyunforeseen events newsworthy in and of themselves,to cover 350th festivities. "Our philosophy is togive our readers what they need to know," says thepaper's Boston bureau head Larry Ingrassia, "notmore than they need to know."CrimsonPeter H. SchwartzThe newsstand at Out of Town News is thebest indicator of what America thinks aboutHarvard's 350th...
...powers and a disdain for far-reaching federal remedies for social problems. He has a peppery prose style and an acid pen: he once called the Freedom of Information Act "the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored." In a caustic critique of affirmative action, he facetiously proposed a system he dubbed "R.J.H.S.--the Restorative Justice Handicapping System," in which individuals would be awarded points based on their ethnic backgrounds to determine how much they owed society...
That kind of plangent wistfulness is hardly confined to Mother's account of her honeymoon or Grandpa's homesickness for his youth. The tug and ache of nostalgia pull even at the hardiest of travelers. The caustic Evelyn Waugh introduces his collection of travel essays, When the Going Was Good, with a heartbroken valedictory to a vanished Golden Age of travel that is, in effect, a valentine to his own lost youth. In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore...
First of all, there's Harvard Humor. Earlier this year, a friend of mine remarked that people here don't tell the conventional kinds of jokes. Being funny here is being more caustic and cynical than everyone else about everything. It's attacking as many sacred cows per minute as you can. Catholicism. Child abuse. Masturbation. The space shuttle astronauts. The welfare state. Women's rights. If you let any Harvard student let you know there's something you take seriously, get set to hear a nasty joke about...