Word: epithets
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Pure Principle. From first to last, self-schooled, slow-minded Theodore Dreiser was ridiculed as a turgid stylist and a ponderous craftsman. His critics will still find much to ridicule in this novel. Other readers may find that the slow, munching rhythm, the tone-deaf iteration, the lifelessness of epithet, are of a rocklike unity with the earnest intelligence, the upright and enduring heart, which even Dreiser's detractors give him credit for. They may also find that Dreiser was capable of a remarkable purity of communication whenever he was deeply moved. For in the words of the American...
With this for a starter, The Hat tore into the Governor and all local tickets (except his own, headed by No Deal Party man Newbold Morris), hurled the name "politician" as though it were a vile epithet. He raked New York's ancient political machines from The Bronx to Brooklyn, despaired of his carefully nurtured "good government" if Morris failed at the polls. He even attempted to sell his man to Tom Dewey: "Governor Dewey. I ask you ... do the big thing . . . admit the hopelessness of Goldstein's campaign...
Critic Henry L. Mencken slashed at U.S. smugness and provincialism and fixed the arbiters of its life and bad taste in a cruel epithet: the booboisie. And Poet E. E. Cummings mocked...
Last year Lewis engaged in a verbal slugging match with Harvard's crotchety critic Bernard DeVoto, who (in The Literary Fallacy) had attacked Lewis and other writers of the '205, had urged that the epithet "fool" be introduced into the vocabulary of literary criticism. "Fool," cried Novelist Lewis...
Thereafter, Bank Clerk Service answered to the epithet of "Bard" and became Whitehorse's leading celebrity. After repeating his first success with Ballads of a Cheechako and a popular novel of the Gold Rush, The Trail of '98, he was free to live and wander as he liked...