Word: flippant
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...getting around it: Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was what the nonliterary citizen would call a raw book and decidedly not for the high-school youngsters. One of its six short stories had 20 more or less detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse. But Memoirs was no flippant bedroom farce. Fat, fiftyish Author Wilson, book critic for the New Yorker, had written it as a critique of modern manners and morals. Most reviewers agreed that it was an honest and intelligent work; many a reviewer and reader found it labored, obscure, pedantic and depressing. By all the form...
...amateur group. And it is also not surprising that an unmistakable though possibly unconscious grasping for the "New Yorker" short story style is evident in some of the contributions. But "Radditudes" is making a fine effort towards providing the Cambridge scene with an undergraduate magazine that is neither flippant nor academic--a task that Harvard seems unwilling to tackle...
...respectively by European Veterans Arnold Pressburger and Douglas Sirk, this suave, tinkling entertainment has a marked continental accent. It is evident in the Casanovian irony with which such matters as adultery and infatuation, both virginal and senile, are handled; in George Sanders' chilled-okra delivery of his classically flippant lines; in Hanns Eisler's unconventional score; and in the constant indication that the sets and costumes and lighting were controlled by people interested in applying their knowledge of the fine arts to the screen...
...which a naval cadet was falsely convicted of theft), and dressed it with care. His characters spoke their usual brittle, japanned British, but the effect was biting satire, not light comedy. As the surprise wore off, Londoners decided that they liked their Rattigan serious as well as flippant...
Most Americans who remember the Prohibition Era would rather not. But to Norman Hume Anthony, onetime editor of Judge, Life and Ballyhoo, ft is the time when Americans were happiest. His autobiography, just published, How to Grow Old Disgracefully (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3) is a flippant, bawdy, superficial account of phenomenal success and complete comedown in the tricky business of trying to make magazine readers laugh. It is also the most unashamed backward look at the National Bender in a long time...