Word: doltish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Seventeenth-Century Moliére (real name: Jean Baptiste Poquelin) might have been a little startled at what has happened to his doltish M. Jourdain, who was already an outrageous enough butt. Everybody swindled and snickered at him-the dancing masters and fencing masters hired to teach him the graces; the count who was to present him at court; the marquise with whom he craved a modish liaison. But Moliére's butt-who suddenly learned with rapture that he had been speaking prose all his life-was a passably solid character. When Zany Clark gets through with...
...taken to be moral slobs, mental deficients, and fools; and if Europeans now seek to milk us, we have only "Our Boys" to blame. It will take years to repair the widespread distrust of the U.S. produced, not by bombs or diplomatic deals, but by our half-educated, doltish youth...
...peasants scratched their lice and wallowed in filth unmatched since the Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong man was Don Emmanuel Godoy, a half-educated, country-born ex-guardsman, who had become Prime Minister through his prowess as Queen...