Word: debunker
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...took lessons for only seven years, still hates to practice and seldom does (says he: "I practice in my head"). His teacher, who was,a close friend of Brahms, took him along on several of Brahms's famed walks in the Vienna woods. Schnabel loves to debunk the pressagent story that Brahms discovered him at his first recital, and praised his genius: "I fully expect to read some day that I played billiards with Mozart." Adds Schnabel, with a burgher's chuckle: "The only thing Brahms ever said to me was 'Are you hungry, boy?' before...
...Paul R. Hawley, tubby medical chief of the Veterans' Administration, loves to tell tall tales (he files his favorites in a little black book, which he carries around with him). An ardent student of military history, he also likes to debunk such heroes as General Custer (TIME, Aug. 18), and to refight old battles (once, toting an armload of Civil War books, he visited Gettysburg and reconstructed the battle so vividly that his account is now the official one taught at the Army War College...
...world of tomorrow" have been enough to make realists see red. Sidney A. Mullikin, sales and advertising manager, and Thomas L. Hand, formerly product designer for The Schaible Co. (small plumbing fixtures) of Cincinnati, have been much annoyed by these streamlined taradiddles. Seized one day with a desire to debunk the false prophets, Mullikin & Hand planned a reductio ad absurdum, their own radar-electronic "kitchen of tomorrow," and showed a sketch of it to their boss. Schaible was so tickled that it rounded out the idea in a burlesque pamphlet, sent it out as direct-mail advertising. By last week...
William E. Woodward is the man who coined the word "debunk." In 1923, when he was a Hearst promotion manager, he used the word in a best-selling first novel called Bunk. He followed it up with two debunking biographies: George Washing ton and Meet General Grant, and his New American History, which debunked traditional U.S. history...
...coldhearted skeptics who sought to debunk Sikaiana with dry research got the shock of their lives from the Navy Hydrographic Office's staid, unromantic Sailing Directions for the Pacific Islands: "The natives are Polynesians and have remarkably light colored skins. They are handsome and have a splendid physique...