Word: dictums
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...class. Himself a relentless connoisseur, a professional dandy, and perhaps the best known boulevardier of his time, Social Chronicler Beebe held that the true test of spenders of distinction was not necessarily how they rid themselves of substantial sums of money but rather how closely they subscribed to the dictum of the late Gene Fowler: "Money is something to be thrown off the back end of trains." As an example of a freehanded spender with class, Beebe gives an account of Boston's Mrs. Jack Gardner's paying Paderewski $3,000 to play at teatime for an elderly...
Opera cynics today occasionally claim that successful productions are necessarily about 80 per cent staging; but if that dictum held last night, Giovanni would have been a disaster. Designer W. E. Schroeder was faced with the sizeable challenge of eight sudden and radical scene changes, and totally cowed, he reverted to a single homely, primitive set, which remains essentially unchanged for three and one-half hours. Nor were the ideas of Luiz-Lopez-Cepero of much greater ambitiousness; both the overall blocking and the dance sequences remained clumsy and often unconvincing...
Until recently, many American humorists obeyed that caveat by looking the other way when the subject was raised, or treating the whole thing as a joke. Robert Benchley spoke for most of his colleagues when he lampooned the scientific students of humor with his dictum: "We must understand that all sentences which begin with W are funny." Well, something unfunny has happened to American humor. Today the humorists are outexamining the examiners, some of them even making second careers as commentators who probe and pontificate on the radio and TV panels that ceaselessly sift American manners, morals and mores...
...that. From page 1 of the book, when he sets the stage for Kennedy's Inauguration by describing the "eerie beauty" of blizzard-bound Washington, to page 1031, when he rings down the curtain on a snow-covered grave in Arlington, he follows Thomas Babington Macaulay's dictum that "a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated...
Repetitiveness is also writ large in The Uncommitted; Keniston repeats chapters as well as sentences. He has evidently taken the hoary Gen. Ed. A dictum to heart: say what you plan to say; say it; say what you've said. This technique puffs up what ought to be a modest essay into a 500 page book, plus a separate monograph, The Alienated Student, as yet unpublished...