Word: comically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cigar box on the front seat. In Detroit, a college student explained his windshield emblem: "The police like this sort of thing, and maybe, if I'm speeding and they see the flag, they won't pull me over." Cartoonist Al Capp, whose Li' l Abner comic strips have been waxing increasingly patriotic, probably speaks for the less cynical majority when he says: "The flag looks better waving than burning...
...tend to be devalued by the new erotica. Three centuries or so ago, William Shakespeare or John Donne could convey passion, poetry, disgust and concupiscence in words with artful undermeanings that shocked none. Nowadays, a few greatly gifted writers can effectively employ the familiar quad-riliterals for dramatic or comic effect, but they tend to lose their value through overuse. As George Orwell observed 22 years ago, "If only our half-dozen 'bad' words could be got off the lavatory wall and onto the printed page, they would soon lose their magical quality." That process is well under...
...must be a bit subversive, as well as comic, ambiguous and heroic in order to play middleman in a world where everybody else appears as an extremist of one sort or another. Spender shows a certain fondness for "girls with hair like seaweed." He is as fascinated as a traveler from another planet by the rebel-rhetorical style, which he traces back to the beatniks: "It had the inspiration of some sustained fit of oaths from the mouth of a drunken Welshman." He even admires the way student-rebels combine "a passion for solitude with a love of being televised...
...least of the novelist's functions is to serve as a moral bookkeeper, making all those entries on the liability side of the ledger that a society might otherwise prefer to forget. In his new book, ruefully comic Novelist Jerome Charyn (Once Upon a Droshky) records the shape and the existence of a small, dreadful chapter in our recent national history...
...year-old kid sister who becomes pregnant; Napoleon, her kid brother who dreams of becoming a Navy bombardier; Chuichi, a bitter boy who has been summarily dropped out of an American Army paratroop unit. Harold, a literate older brother, irreverently sabotages the ultra-patriotic camp newspaper by inventing a comic-strip character known as "the Nippon Pimpernel." Against an otherworldly background of Screenland magazines, Baby Ruth candy bars, and zoot suiters jitterbugging to the music of "the Jive Bombers, the true Mi-kados of swing," camp life is not all camp. The prisoners are soon polarized into two groups...