Word: cranked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Paris as the friend of Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, the discoverer of Frost, the teacher of Eliot (who dedicated The Waste Land to him) and even of Yeats. But sometime in the 1930s something went tragically askew. The man Eliot called "the greatest poet alive" lapsed into an aging crank, teasing out nutty monetary theories, making Fascist noises about "international Jewry" as "the true enemy," stuffing junk and glories into a multilingual magpie epic called The Cantos. During World War II he made pro-Axis broadcasts from Rome. Accused of treason and brought back to the U.S., he escaped trial...
...appreciate the damage that this sort of sloppiness can do, it is useful to invoke the late Count Alfred Korzybski, inventor of general semantics. Korzybski was a Polish-born mathematician and physicist, part crank and part genius, who regarded his theory as a whole new science of life. Our language, argued Korzybski, does not reflect reality, and its structure does not correspond to the seen or unseen world. Its grammar, based on Aristotelian logic, implies primitive philosophical concepts tied to the prescientific past. All this leads to emotional disturbances and frustrations, known as semantic shock. Korzybski prescribed some mental tricks...
...unpredictable as his facial expressions: an adamant sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a psychopathic killer in Charade, an ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie, the libidinous suburban husband in A Guide for the Married Man. Of late, his roles have yielded an amusing but unvarying character: the rumpled crank whose shpeesh shoundsh ash if it wash making itsh way around a shigar. Plaza Suite happily puts him in reverse. In Arthur Hiller's rigid transcription of Neil Simon's Broadway one-acters set in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, Matthau essays not one part but three. Each...
...father of "momism" in Generation of Vipers, Polemicist-Novelist Philip Wylie has a certain reputation to live up to. In his own way, he turned the crank letter into a literary form. In that eruption 29 years ago, he added to the sum of human choler by announcing, among other things: "Gentlemen, mom is a jerk...
...Hollywood previews are hardly the big deals they would have you believe-out in Los Angeles they crank out two or three a week and even the daily smog alert generates more excitement. But here in Boston where the only matters of course seem to be 10" snowfalls and nurses discovered strangled in their Back Bay apartments, Hollywood-typed previews are not so easily dispatched with, By December 18, with Christmas vacation only hours away, most of the Harvard community had already departed for its geographically distributed homes, except for those lucky few ... after all, man, who'd be crazy...