Word: galling
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...second time to a military hospital for the shell-shocked and insane. After discharge Grosz found the subject that made his reputation: the postwar nightmare of inflation-ridden Berlin. Grosz glared at the world with jaundiced, penetrating eye, set down the characters he saw in portraits etched in gall: frozen-faced Prussian officers, lecherous, high-collared industrialists, black-marketeers, mutilated soldiers, and the city's frumpish, lard-fleshed whores. Perversely, the rich enjoyed their own caricatures. But when the Nazis took over, they were not so understanding; Grosz's savage anti-Hitler cartoons soon earned him a place...
Cure for the Enigma. The head-reading business began (the start seems somehow familiar) with a Vienna doctor who had some strange and original notions about the nature of man. He was Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), who made the simple discovery that "character was the brain." From this it was a simple step to decide that if one knew what went on on the surface of the brain, one would know what went on underneath. Before long there was a little chart dividing the brain into 37 faculties, each doing its little bit to help...
...humor, like all gall, is divided into three parts, 1) slapstick, 2) situation comedies, 3) synthetic shyness. Last week a baker's dozen of high-priced comics was laboring hard in all three varieties spraying each other with Seltzer, spinning out plots as remote from reality as life on the moon, or being browbeaten by guest stars and fellow actors...
Another fallacy: "It is surprising how often you hear people remark behind the back of a patient suffering from neurotic anxieties or neurotic mood disorders, 'If he only pulled himself together-surely he could help it!' . . . Nobody would ever think that an abscess of the gall bladder can be treated by pulling oneself together, but not many people are prepared to look at nervous anxiety states with the same attitude . . . Many religious people use towards a neurotic patient a kind of spiritual approach of 'Pull yourself together!' ... By this attitude religion becomes a sort of mental...
...could "swim up and down alone, naked, her long red hair, which when uncoiled reached her knees, trailing in the water behind her." But in a short two years all the romance had gone from their marriage. When Elinor confided to Clayton that a friend of his had the gall to kiss her, she was heartbroken to hear her husband chuckle. "Did he? Good old Brookie!" Clayton was ardent only for a male heir. When Elinor presented him with a second daughter, he took off for Monte Carlo in a huff and dropped ?10,000 at cards and roulette. Elinor...