Word: debunks
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Most excesses do not display the exaggerator's art in it's best light: they are merely blurbs and rodomontade. In more complex usage, exaggeration does dynamic and suggestive work: it can be used to frighten or threaten , to reassure(oneself or others),to glorify and debunk, and, above all, to relieve the tedium of life to entertain. Exaggeration is one of the methods of all myth-from Olympian deities to giants like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, to mythic historical figures- Mao, say, or George Patton. A child exaggerates his parents' powers to the point...
...politicians of the New Right animated by an immaculate affection for free enterprise? Or, perhaps, do their ideologies and regional interests conveniently coincide? It's always popular to debunk the government. But at least he realizes that the domestic function of government is to prevent the economy, where possible, from becoming altogether distorted, and to clean up after the social ills created by the public sector. Admittedly, the dynamism of American enterprise created this country's prosperity; it also created economic behavior and trends with undesirable and dangerous social implications. Government fulfills a protective role for Americans, so quietly...
...suggest he had shed his thrift shop threads for Giorgio Armani suits and a clean-shaven, manicured Continental haute couture. Sitting in one of Herb Cohen's small offices and backdropped by a fountain and Spanish courtyard, Waits needn't have inquired "Giorgio who?" to debunk that fiction. One look was enough: pointed black shoes (leather cracked), tight, wrinkled straight black pants, a haphazardly-buttoned off-white white shirt, his goatee more under his chin than on it, and wavy brown hair jutted high on top, seemingly propped upright by a pair of oversized sideburns...
MOLIERE'S PLAYS are masterpieces of satiric comedy which mercilessly debunk the fraudulent and bogus in society, with true love emerging as the victor over all the social conventions which oppose...
Harris' intention, to debunk the old Victorian "onwards and upwards" view of cultural evolution, is admirable, though hardly rare today. But the book fizzles to a rather banal conclusion--"In life, as in any game whose outcome depends on both luck and skill, the rational response to bad odds is to try harder." For the news that our culture is by no means the first one to face a crisis threatening its whole survival may console those who are comforted in adversity by company (though the companions in this instance are all dead) but otherwise there seem...