Word: compliments
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...also leads to an excessive emphasis on issues. The word focused is used as a compliment these days, but where it means discipline, it just as often suggests tunnel vision. Political chatter to the contrary, I do not think that most people want to listen to speeches devoted to issues at all--or if they do, they quickly grow accustomed to (and bored by) the predictable positions a candidate takes. The "issue" that people never tire of is that of basic national principles and ambitions, the promotion of which, though usually couched in cliches, is eternally engaging because it touches...
...Forming a slightly irregular love-triangle with Knapp is comfortably English agent Mr. Blair (George Byron) and the rambling, bumbling Soviet physicist-turned English spy, Dr. Kerner (James A. Carmicheal '00). It is a compliment to these actors that they are able to engage the audience in the drama's preoccupation with notions of Britishness...
...Lloyd Bentsen's line in 1988: "I knew John Kennedy, and you're no John Kennedy!" (It occurred to no one at the time of that mot, which landed on Dan Quayle's jaw, that to tell a man he was no John Kennedy might actually be a compliment...
...such passionately acute readings in works sublime and not so; what other actor would be pleased both to be the definitive romantic Hamlet, which he acted some 500 times, and to lend regal pedigree to Bob Guccione's pornific Caligula? Who else could earn critic Kenneth Tynan's prickly compliment "the finest actor on earth, from the neck...
...York Times, once told me about covering Mao's China. One day in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Burns was getting his car repaired by a mechanic at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. The mechanic told Burns, "I have been reading your articles." The complacent Burns, expecting a compliment, said, "Oh, really?" The mechanic, not looking up from the engine, said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, they're all complete rubbish, you know. This entire country is a prison, and you don't even know it." Burns was shocked. It was the beginning of wisdom for him as a journalist...