Word: criticize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...critic is supposed to criticize. He's supposed to pan or to praise to his heart's content, that's his primary reason for existence. What's more, his criticism is supposed to be based on a reasonably complete knowledge of the subject he's talking about, whether it be Egyptian art or American movies...
This leads to the question of music criticism in general. Few would deny that critics are a natural and necessary evil as long as people listen to music as a serious aesthetic experience, but what line should criticism take? It should be constructive, but not in a soupy, overtolerant way, nor yet in a casual "Well, what does it matter anyhow?" sort of way. The former type is represented in New York by such as Downes of the "Times" who is one of the best meaningless-phrase-makers in the business, and the latter by such as Simon...
...More fun for the writer because of his freedom in the choice of subject, and less for the reader because of the reviewer's obvious lack of the long listening experience and mature judgment that mark the work of most of his New York colleagues. In addition, the Crimson critic has the consolation of being almost functionless in a practical sense. No matter how many stones he may throw, not a ripple will disturb the bustle and equanimity of the musical world of Boston and environs. He cannot destroy a budding artist nor stir up a nation-wide controversy...
Best-known and most ebullient of U.S. lecturers on the drama, New York World-Telegram Critic John Mason Brown annually faces clubwomen in most of the 48 States, spends as many nights in hotel rooms as in his own bed. The gusto he throws into his lecturing he has also thrown into a book about it. Accustomed As I Am (Norton; $2) makes amusing copy of a lecturer's occupational hazards...
...books, shouting: "Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease." In its place he developed a lively and somewhat overarch Guedalla English which soon helped to make biographies almost as popular reading as novels. It also boosted the sales of his books (as one critic observed with Guedallan acidity) "within measuring distance of the giddy heights attained by Mr. Edgar Wallace and Miss Elinor Glynn." It was a style nicely adapted to describing the molting eagles of Napoleon I (The Hundred Days) and the tacky grandeurs of Napoleon III (The Second Empire...