Word: clownish
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...this clownish dupe, Keneally also knows, finally outmanipulated all her manipulators. To Keneally she is the incarnation of an idea whose time had come - the peasant striding into the council of kings and lords of the church. As rude as common fare, she serves notice on the feudal system that knighthood is no longer in flower. As she lifts the siege at Orléans and pushes her balky Dauphin with the "fat, un happy lips" toward his coronation at Rheims, she is hurrying onstage not a monarchy but the modern nation-state. The descendants of this Joan...
Fake or Freak. The author has warned that there must be no critical truffling in his works for deep-lying meanings. His word games in Harlequins justify the warning. Butterflies, however, may be chased. Nabokov, for instance, taught at Cornell University after emigrating to the U.S., and his clownish alter ego taught at "Quirn." The Oxford English Dictionary directs the student to "Quern," which derives in its first definition from a variety of languages, including old High German, Swedish and Russian ("Zhernov"), and means "a simple apparatus for grinding corn." The second definition is "a large piece of ice." These...
...most widely published editorial cartoonists. Whether he is shown carrying on both ends of a phone conversation (and listening in on earphones in the middle) or provoking hysterical laughter in a Martian seeking earth's leader, Wright's Nixon is an unvarying emblem of sinister paranoia or clownish ineptitude...
Most of the portrayals are equally competent if occasionally irritating. Daniel Von Gargen as the artist trying to marry Vandergelder's timid niece Ermengarde often seems too foppishly petulant in his clownish suit. And the cook in the VanHuysen household (to which Ermengarde is sent for safe-keeping), provides a disturbingly vague ethnic element in a frenetic last act which otherwise finally gives itself over to the true spirit of the farce. Was she Swedish, Hungarian, German...
Hunt describes the trial as a morose circus. The prosecutor is a plodding Percheron pitted against a couple of clownish counsels for the defense. One of them addresses the jury: "I leave thk with you, and I know that when you consider this case from all of its aspects every part of the statements, and the beatings, and the lack of will, and lack of intellect-do you think that these boys, lacking practically any education (that's another item to be considered by you)-I say that the resistance here was overcome by force...