Word: conceited
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Steven Millhauser, a Brown University graduate student, has given it a game try in a really promising short novel. His jokes are broader than Nabokov's and are not woven into the story with nearly the master's exquisite timing. But he is witty, and his conceit -making both the artist and his biographer small boys-is elastic enough to stretch the length of the book...
...that I make/ a not impossible world," one stanza begins, "but an Eden it cannot be." Auden is addressing the invisible, microscopic creatures who inhabit his body ("Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobic and Anaerobics") as men inhabit the world. Clinical knowledge of their doings helps him spin out a metaphysical conceit that manages to spoof mildly the anthropocentric folly of men in assuming that God thinks in human imagery, and at the same time modestly asserts that God exists...
...when last seen, had just set his loyal horde of fellow rats upon Willard, his misanthropic master. Willard ended, appropriately enough, with Willard's grisly demise, but Ben is back as busy as ever in this sleazy slice of horror for the pre-high school set. The basic conceit of both the rat and the ape pictures is that animals at worst are misunderstood and at best are infinitely preferable to humans. Ben pals around with a sickly kid named Danny who suf fers from a weak heart and, to judge by his actions in the movie, a weak...
Author Owen Rachleff (The Occult Conceit), who teaches a course called Witchcraft, Magic and Astrology at New York University, takes a dim view of the whole movement. "Most occultniks," says Rachleff, "are either frauds of the intellectual and/or financial variety, or disturbed individuals who frequently mistake psychosis for psychic phenomena." Yet for all its trivial manifestations in tea-leaf readings and ritual gewgaws, for all the outright nuts and charlatans it attracts, occultism cannot be dismissed as mere fakery or faddishness. Clearly, it is born of a religious impulse and in many cases it becomes in effect a substitute faith...
...recently published Let History Judge (TIME, Jan. 17), Roy Medvedev says that Trotsky's conceit was so famous that many of his own supporters called him barin (the lord...