Word: detract
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...indifferent in all," very nearly applies. Mr. Coward is a clever satirist and was quite evidently born with a silver tune in his mouth, but he is still caught in The Vortex and overdoes his stuff as a consequence. His frenzied, nail-gnawing and agonized eye-rolling largely detract from the effectiveness of "Dance, Little Lady," while his indifferent voice and dancing similarly blur a number of other scenes...
...secret to my admirers that I intend to enter the field myself some time. But more of that later. I don't wish to detract interest from Hoover and Smith in the present campaign. I'll just let a little more information leak out about the election...
...galleries wahooed. The stand-pattingest of the standpatters smiled indulgently. At one burst of applause, the young man bowed deeply and said: "It is so unusual for a Republican from Wisconsin to receive applause at a National Republican Convention that I thank you most sincerely." Then, lest politeness detract from potency, he asked that the remark be stricken from the record. But everyone remembered the politeness and before the young man left the platform he had cause to take more bows, hand over heart, actor-fashion. Everyone enjoyed it and the thunderous "No" that soon buried the Minority Platform...
Lacking these two essentials, companionate marriage must be technically regarded as a form of courtship. Nor does this detract from its possible value. Sexual experience in courtship is looked upon by many modern moralists with the utmost disapproval; even "necking," they think, is disgraceful. Other moralists have defended premarital sexual experience of a more or less complete nature. More primitive people, in various ways, have practiced it. Recent "puritanical" criticism of companionate marriage has stimulated interest in a strange pastime, widely practiced among the early inhabitants of New England and known...
...scenery is adequate, does not detract from other actors, and the changings of settings are made rapidly...