Word: clever
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...Snow: 1905-1980 "I'm a fairly clever chap and can put my hand to things," C.P. Snow liked to say. The self-appraisal was a classic of good British understatement. Snow put his hand to a stunning variety of things. He was a novelist, essayist, biographer, physicist, playwright, civil servant, company director, government official. Member of Parliament, teacher and public lecturer. His death last week at age 74 brought to an end not one life but many...
UNLIKE MANY RECENT American movies, which often leave behind the sour aftertaste of burnt pizza, cute French petit-fours such as Coup de Tete impart no flavor at all. They slide down smoothly, provincial realism and honest emotion buried beneath the sweet, slick icing of a clever plot and anti-bourgeois humor...
...Coup de Tete" means "hothead" in French and Perrin, Dawaere's shuffling maniac, is certainly a hothead, a clever village idiot who knows, at least what idiocy he has perpetrated. And what idiocy he has not. One frustrating day, when nothing goes right for the luckless Perrin, he decides to leave town, to remove his boyish good looks and soccer talent from the clutches of the petit-bourgeois burghers of Trincamp, a quaint French ville whose occupants lust for a national soccer championship. But before Perrin can escape, the local cops nab him for a rape he didn't commit...
...falsifying university exam scores. One of the most common abuses among officials is influence peddling to obtain favors for their children. As a modern-day Chinese proverb has it: "The 10,000 things are good, but they are not as good as a well-connected father." In Shanghai, one clever young swindler named Tang Fang posed as the son of the first secretary of the provincial party committee, a ruse that won him not only watches, money and fashionable clothes but also the affection of a comely female soldier...
...include electrics in meeting their federally mandated 1985 corporate average fuel-efficiency rating of 27.5 rn.p.g. Since the electrics use no gasoline, Detroit, to the extent its output includes EVs, will be able to turn out larger, less efficient-and thus more profitable-gasoline-powered cars. That was a clever political end run, yet no one is complaining. Says Paul Brown, who heads the EV program at DOE: "It was just good, practical politics...