Word: creep
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Film is only a little less remote than painting. It entrances because it moves. Structure spectators that we are, cushioned and slouching in adjustable seats, row upon regimented row, the directors have to creep on shoeless feet. Camouflaged by pathos, bathos, and gales of laughter, their goal is our back-bone. Else they impale themselves, as Bergman often does, on our pointy little heads...
...abated and the recovery was well under way, the stock market has tumbled recently. Last week the Dow Jones industrial average closed at 805, down 21 points for the week. Bond prices also dipped on news of the July rise in living costs, and interest rates continued to creep upward-a sign that lenders, too, expect inflation to remain rampant and are determined to extract a higher price for their money...
Police prose is a burlesque of the administrative: "I apprehended the alleged perpetrator." (In a bar, the cop would say, "I collared this creep.") Eventually, all officialese takes on a mindless life of its own, the words combining and recombining according to some notion in the bureaucratic inner ear of how public language ought to sound, regardless (or irregardless, as they say) of what it means. This is an aerosol English, released by pushing a button. Writer Jimmy Breslin describes what is perhaps the ultimate in this prose: a policeman, testifying in a homicide case, refers to "the alleged victim...
Each of Calvino's parables comes from a single mold, and so do each of Marco Polo's cities. As the catalogue progresses, anachronisms begin to creep into the explorer's narrative, and his empire begins to expand outward in time as well as space. Kublai Kahn discovers this...
...imitation is funny, Groucho's anti-establishment pranks on hotel-managers and rich matrons are funny. Gene Wilder's charicature of Dr. Frankenstein is funny; the audience cheers them on. Jack Nicholson dumping the heiress in a birdbath is discomfiting because she's nice and he's a slimy creep. The indignity should be the other way around...