Word: frantically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stepping stone for the career of an ambitious man. Lest it be forgotten, let me remind you that Alger Hiss was granted all due process of law and was proved a perjurer, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, proved by evidence that cannot be refuted despite the frantic clutching at the straw of the Hiss typewriter. In large measure Mr. Nixon was responsible for that proof. Way we should condemn him for acting as an effective agent of the rule of law is beyond my poor perceptions...
...blowout. The bespectacled old expatriate, whose pad is almost a photographic shrine to his late sister, Dancer Isadora Duncan, gave them a weirdly nostalgic show. In a quavering saloon tenor he sang My Old Kentucky Home; then, unshorn silver locks and hand-woven toga flying, he launched into a frantic soft-sandal jig. The Dior-dressed segment of the crowd dug it deep. But the modern beats, obviously distressed that no food and no smoking were allowed, did not get the scene at all. Said one bewildered beard to another: "I don't know what this cat is laying...
Naturally, JC never understands Kitten. Readers, making their way through her frantic, phonetic dialect, in which breathtaking obscenities are so pervasive that they soon cease to shock, will at first sympathize with him. But Author Gover is gleefully staging the classic confrontation between educated fool and ignorant sage. Even in broken English, Kitten soon turns out to be a lot smarter and pleasanter than JC. When he decides to steal her car and keep it until she returns the money, he describes the move "as a last recourse to retaliatory capability, humanely applied as persuasion rather than force...
...Frantic Phonetics. "Christmas!" exclaims James Cartwright ("JC") Holland, "You'd think an intelligent, redblooded, white, church-going non-Communist like I ... would avoid ending up in the nude." JC, who tells about half the story in a stilted diary, is risibly riddled with middle-class hypocrisy. He believes in, and mouths at inappropriate moments, all the sociological doubletalk, cold war gobbledygook, and commercial jargon that he has ever heard...
Into early October, the Soviets proceeded covertly, masking their operations with lies and claims that they were sending only "defensive" weapons to Cuba. Then they threw off stealth, lunging ahead in a frantic, scarcely concealed push to get offensive missiles up and ready to fire. Their aim was devastatingly obvious: they meant to present the U.S. with the accomplished fact of a deadly missile arsenal on Cuba...