Word: fatuous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their play. When the two toga-clad men encounter difficult philosophical problems--"Is freedom chaos?"--they call on the "audience" for help. To their rescue comes Doris Levine, a blonde, boppy philosophy student from Wellesley, played with convincing ditziness by Isabelle Hurtubise. In the course of the action other fatuous students are called to the stage: Lorenzo Miller (Arzhang Kamarei), the pompous playwright, Trichinosis (Joel Pulliam), another Greek who invents the ridiculous deus ex machina to save the play and a regal but spacy Queen (Elizabeth Price) who strolls in with a roast beef sandwich. Woody Allen himself even phones...
...limitations in no way comforted him") and breathless dialogue ("There's got to be a way!") will not find it hard to decipher Marilyn's ideological prejudices. The hero is a black Republican Senator from Georgia and a defender of the Star Wars program who is up against a fatuous Democratic President with "little understanding" of his country's security, an intelligence community "crippled by the micromanagement of Congress" and the elitist editor of Washington's biggest daily, who is conducting his own private foreign policy when he is not in bed with a Senator's wife. That...
John (Karl Saddlemeyer), Geoffrey (Richard Claflin) and Richard Lionheart (Adam Geyer), Henry's sons, provide both comic relief and a tragic element as they struggle for the throne. Saddlemeyer's fatuous complacence amuses the audience: "I'm Father's favorite--that's what counts." Claflin shows resentment at being the proverbial second son by spitting out every sarcastic line. Geyer shows the roots of Richard's Oedipal dilemma early in the play with his seemingly inexplicable hatred of his mother...
Overall, The Miracle of Language is hard to fault. One shortcoming is Lederer's "linguacentricity" (to coin a phrase) as regards the study of language. It is annoying to encounter fatuous comments like "No doubt English was invented in heaven" or to have him assert that the angels speak English...
...best man? In off-the-record comments, White House aides agree with the analysis of Harvard law professor Christopher Edley: "If Thomas were white, he would not have been nominated . . . ((Bush's)) meritocratic language is fatuous unless one takes both color and ideology into account in deciding what it means to be the best qualified...