Word: dumbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...then, you have to wonder a little bit about the man with the satchel of explosives. If he is so smart, why does he leave, where any dumb flatfoot can find it, a map with one of his targets circled...
...determination born of despair to hide the evidence of his misdemeanor. Mrs. Prentice rushes madly from one end of the stage to the other, always one step behind. Melissa Franklin, as the hapless Geraldine Barclay, adds an Edward Gorey-like gallows humor to the play. She plays the innocent, dumb blond with evenness, never falling into the easy trap of whining or simpering...
More "advanced" societies have forgotten the demonic language of superstition and luck, which they are inclined to call "dumb" or "blind." They often have no better explanation than primitives do for luck's strange intercessions, but they generally adopt a strategy both passive and fatalistic, a stoical mixture of rationalism and resignation to luck's works. Today it is mainly gamblers who stay on intimate and dangerous terms with luck and try to tame and possess it. Here and there, state lotteries have tried to bureaucratize luck-a dreary business and a contradiction in terms...
...porch into his house. Told to lower her voice, the wife (Mary Louise Wilson) of an eye doctor (Harold Gould) scrunches toward the floor. Occasionally, Simon abandons these hoary vaudeville turns for a flash of absurdist humor. The doctor's daughter (Pamela Reed), adorable as she is dumb, is asked what her favorite color is and replies, "Yellow. . . because it doesn't stick to your fingers so much." Her mother mutters: "I think she's wrong. I think it's blue...
...lobotomized, throwing each other over, punching each other up, selling each other out. Elvis Costello has played a lot of clubs these last few years; after an angry, violent American tour, morsels of America sizzled in his brainpan, and in Get Happy!! Elvis thrust his middle finger up her dumb whore B-Movie hole, the music as hyper-energized, as fractious and scrappy as the country itself. It was a smashing, reverberating disc that some of us thought would go through the roof critically and commercially. Alas. audiences and rock critics can't digest so much. They prefer...