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Word: drollness (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolts and therefore pile up as many of you apiece as we can get--this is what too many of you seem to forget. "Coleridge may be said...

Author: By A Grader, | Title: Grader's Reply: It's Not Really That Easy | 8/15/1989 | See Source »

...captain and a first lieutenant of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces simultaneously turned two keys that would, in wartime, send hurtling toward the U.S. an SS-19 ballistic missile with six independently targeted thermonuclear warheads. Watching from a corner of the cramped underground control center was a tall, droll Yankee naval officer who describes himself as a "country boy from Oklahoma": Admiral William J. Crowe, 64, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American military official ever to visit the U.S.S.R...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: America Abroad: A Yankee in Gorbachev's Court | 7/3/1989 | See Source »

Beyond that, Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Free State | 5/22/1989 | See Source »

...ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolts and therefore pile up as many of you apiece as we can get--this is what too many of you seem to forget. "Coleridge may be said...

Author: By A Grader, | Title: A Grader's Reply | 5/15/1989 | See Source »

Scandal, whose producers had to snip a few naughty bits from the Novotny orgy to avoid an X rating in the U.S., is wonderfully performed by Hurt (pained irony), McKellen (droll reserve) and, as Rice-Davies, Peter Fonda's daughter Bridget (comic acuity). The film names names and gets the tone right. ! This is a morally exhausted society, where every woman is a whore and every man a pimp or a trick until proved otherwise. It has no hero or heroine, only a victim: Stephen Ward, who loved trashy women and was betrayed by distinguished...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Cinema: A Moll and Her Night Visitors | 5/1/1989 | See Source »

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