Word: dumbing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Later in the book, in an essay called "Were Dinosaurs Dumb?," Gould takes us back to third grade and quotes from his textbook, the 1948 edition of Bertha Morris Partker's Animals of Yesterday, which the author admits he stole from P.S.26. Presenting the prevalent view of the huge reptiles, Gould writes...
There are theater-of-the-absurd interludes to the chronicle. The screenwriter Martin Berkeley, in a burst of informer's promiscuity, names 161 names. Judy Holliday, the incomparable impersonator of Hollywood dumb blonds, hires a researcher to check out her own political past. Zero Mostel shakes a grisly cap-and-bell to boast: "I am a man of a thousand faces, all of them blacklisted...
...meet new challenges. One expert adviser says that Reagan's instincts are sound and his mind open to argument, but adds candidly that Reagan has difficulty seeing the connections between related problems and goals. An aide who is much closer to Reagan personally says, "He isn't dumb, but sometimes he has a lazy brain. He reads something, and it goes into the reservoir he has up there without checking. It comes out when he turns the spigot...
...identity, about a woman "finding herself" in a man's world, but its silliness and simplicity insults all feminists, male and female. Judy Benjamin (Goldie Hawn) is an airhead. A Jewish American Princess, she's not funny and she's not cute; she'd not even pitiful--just plain dumb...
...smokes cigarettes, drinks bottomless cups of coffee, wears shawl-collared cardigans to the office, and agrees to be Conrad's "friend" for 50 bucks an hour. It seems as if Redford should be satirizing this too, all these people saying "Do you want to talk about it?"; satirize the dumb kid who wants to kill himself as well, if it weren't too cruel--but no, he likes easy targets, WASPishness, the swimming coach...