Word: dilettantishly
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Positive: Mentally energetic, versatile, artistic, witty Negative: Fickle, dilettantish Career: Thinker, writer, artist
Hjalmar and his wife have built a happy house of illusions. In a constant alcoholic trance, Hjalmar's father stocks the attic with birds and rabbits, at which he takes an occasional potshot when he is in a hunting mood. Hjalmar himself is a dilettantish portrait photographer whose wife manages the business while he nurses the mirage that he is on the threshold of a world-shaking scientific discovery. The little girl (Jennifer Harmon) is content merely to love her supposed father and her pet wild duck...
...Hayden's D major quartet, Opus 20, No. 4, and Beethoven's F minor quartet, Opus 95. The performance of the Beethoven was occasionally uncoordinated, rarely clear, and never balanced. Haydn, as Temianka remarked, wrote for the diletanti of the local aristocracy, and in fact, the performance sounded quite dilettantish: the meters of the first and third movements were ambiguous and the 'cello muddy. But in the slow movement, Haydn dispensed with any melodrama or surprises. While the movement's great serene flow, like the cadence of a sonnet, revealed no secrets, it was delicious...
...genius for letter writing aside, the son was a familiar type of cultivated societies-the fussy, dilettantish, delicately feline bachelor, a connoisseur of wit and, even more, of social oddities and human blemishes. Horace carefully examined every ointment, hoping to discover a fly in it, minutely tested every piece of armor, hoping to encounter a crack; yet in all this there was less malice than sense of metier. As Beau Brummell dressed for future ages, or Lucullus dined, Walpole peered into corners. But he had, too, his more special, often laborious pursuits: Strawberry Hill, the house he built...
Early in his task for this week's cover, Artzy decided that the U.S. satellites-designed to seek scientific data-must be personified with definite professional functions. Starting with a dilettantish 0-119 trying to catch a Discoverer capsule with a butterfly net, he proceeded to produce (in clockwise order): a Vanguard III with a nose, "because that satellite was sent up for micrometeorite and magnetic studies, sniffing out information in space"; a shutter-ready, lens-eyed Tiros, taking pictures of the earth's cloud cover; a svelte medicine man of an Explorer I, using "a thermometer...