Word: cleverer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quoting Thoreau's comment that "If a man has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly like a stone to the ground." He adds that "people talk faster than they listen, and you have to give them time to hear what you've said. Clever phrases make slow listening." Andy contends that his veteran colleague Eric Sevareid has discovered that fact only in the past five years and has "improved immeasurably since...
...sets about turning him into a proper British slave. He succeeds to the extent that Friday learns English and performs complicated chores. But the Negro-Indian half-caste will go no further; he refuses to be a black Englishman. Although he is tireless, he is not diligent. He is clever, but not rational. For him, the Church of England, punitive ditch digging and goatskin trousers are merely the mystifying apparatus of Crusoe's games. At last, Crusoe realizes that Friday's instincts may be more sensible than his own. He abandons his bookkeeping system of morality, adopts Friday...
...superficial and burdensomely clever piece. "Ireland's history, or rather the lack of it"-with seven prehistoric cyclopean Duns in its Aran Islands and tumuli in the Boyne and the Blackwater valleys that can be compared with only the pyramids of the Pharaohs! Your man is daft. May God have mercy on his soul...
...Irish missed includes the whole Industrial Revolution. The wit of Wilde and Bernard Shaw jumps us back over the smokestacks to the English Restoration, when Dublin and London were more like country towns and a man had time to work on his wit. Now the English have stopped exporting clever fellows across the Irish Sea. Yet their dandyish wit lingers in the air, and when it flicks against the grotesque imagery of the Gaels, it sets off one of those wild word-fires, fastidiously phrased, that can sometimes blaze up in pubs and books alike, becoming a fire-storm...
...strenuously imaginative production some experiments must fail. Director Kahn has the leaders of France actually speak French while a man and a woman translate into microphones and loudspeakers simultaneously, in U.N. fashion. The effect is clever but distracting. On the other hand, a sense of the seeming invulnerability of the French forces is aptly conveyed by having them outfitted like hockey goalies. Initially, this creates the illusion of invincible force, but later it is revealed as the symbol of futile totalitarianism...