Word: dud
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Half Child, Half Sage. At the outset, it seemed that only luck could have chosen Darwin for his job aboard the Beagle. The fox-hunting son of a prosperous Shrewsbury doctor, the young man proved a dud at school and at Cambridge. At 22, he seemed destined for what Victorians frankly called "a living" in the church. Only a chance friendship with the Rev. Professor J. S. Henslow of Cambridge, a botanist, led to Darwin's recommendation as the Beagle's naturalist. Chance, plus a certain amount of charm, determined that he hit it off immediately with...
...Village flat. Jimmy (Dustin Hoffman) stumbles through episodes from his past, present and fantasy lives. Several of the scenes, and Hoffman's part itself, recall his film role as a social dropout in The Graduate. Though the audience never sees him painting, Jimmy is an abstractionist and a dud at it. He is a glutton for humiliation. As "the only abstract painter in the Village who isn't getting laid," he keeps steady dates with a prostitute (Rose Gregorio) who can't refrain from telling him that her other clients are more sat -isfactory in bed than...
...Detroit fans are the worst I've ever seen," he is careful to limit his complaint to "some" Detroit fans. Even so, he has been belligerent enough to inspire one of those fans to wire a smoke bomb to the engine of Sharyn's car. The bomb was a dud, but it blew the lid off Denny's volcanic temper once again. Says Denny with solemn intensity: "If I ever catch the man who did that, I'll kill...
...celebrated Updike prose style, it is present in all its gradations, which is to say that it ranges from the exquisite to the embarrassing. At its best, Updike's writing flows with an unforgettable, lilting legato: "October's orange ebbed in the marshes; they stretched dud grey to the far rim of sand." The talk of a husband and wife in bed at night, speaking of their children or their friends, evokes in tone and languor the bedroom conversation familiar to all parents. In the Guerins' home, guests move through "a low varnished hallway where...
...Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he is no actor. The bed is his stage, and he is good for any number of encores. What he hankers for, yearns after, aspires toward but cannot reach is a more status-bearing life. He writes a play and it is a dud. He enters advertising and discovers he is no good at it. His only true emotion is self-pity; his agony is that he must endure all the chic, swinging, semihighbrow parties before one of the nubile feathery birds will sing for him. A brisk, no-nonsense sort of novelist, Glanville...