Word: cretin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...State Department, which has come off as something of a cretin in this whole affair, is limited to what it can do by law. Murphy, with the State Department Pakistan desk, says the case of the Kirghiz has been "flopping around for about two years because of a lack of focus to it." He adds that he was "delighted" that the Institute for Alaskan Studies had taken up the Kirghiz cause. But the department, Murphy says, is a bureaucracy, and as such does not have the means to help beyond the processing the papers...
...wondrous box meant to entertain? To elevate? To instruct? To anesthetize? The medium, in its sheer unknowable possibilities, seems to arouse extreme reactions: contempt for its banal condition as the ghetto of the sitcom, or else grandiose metaphysical ambitions for a global village. The tube is Caliban and Prospero, cretin and magician. "What makes television so frightening," writes Critic Jeff Greenfield, "is that it performs all the functions that used to be scattered among different sources of information and entertainment." Television could, if we let it, electronically consolidate all of our culture -theater, ballet, concerts, newspapers, magazines and possibly most...
...dress, cut in strips that hang from her waist, revealing in a flash. Saucy red lipstick and a flower painted on her cheek, she is a smiler, coming right up to me and asking if she can illustrate my entire body. She is a body illustrator. Her name is Cretin Hop. At home she gives me cleavage, shows me a giant watercolor illustration of Patti Smith--slightly smudged by sweat--marked painstakingly beneath the knap of a breast...
...four hijackers have been captured and are standing near the ramp in handcuffs, shouting the familiar slogans of the Cretin Liberation Movement. The hostages-just released after five harrowing days aboard the airliner-are distressed, but not because of their ordeal. "They were very courteous, very humanitarian, " says Marta Dome of her captors. "Once they let me go to the bathroom. "Declares Bertha Nation, who was slapped around: "Any fair-minded American would have to admit that the Cretin people have been driven to this." Egret Birdsnoot has no hard feelings about his injury: "It was just...
...occassional emergency appearances of the play's idiotic and insufferable secondary characters (Victor Prynne, Sybil Chase, and Louise). The first act introduces the entire plot: Amanda and Elyot, once married and later divorced, fall in love again while honeymooning with their newly found spouses, Victor and Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development of plot after act one, there is no major physical action beyond a brief lover's fight in the second. The director and the actors must build all the visual and verbal humor upon the nearly barren...