Word: gilbertian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Importance of Being Earnest, talked up in academic circles as the best farce in the English language, everywhere fails to treat its Gilbertian plot with Gilbertian high spirits. As artificial as the Yellowed Nineties which gave it birth, it has the pasty look and studied jauntiness of an elderly fop. The steady ticktock of its epigrams is broken only when one of them happens to chime. As Wilde said of the youthful Max Beerbohm, the gods have endowed the play's elegant, orchidaceous young men with the gift of perpetual...
Leading comedian of the D'Oyly Carte Company, Green has chosen for his address the subject "From Street Clothes to Character." That is his title, and within that title he plans to tell of the methods by which he creates and portrays the Gilbertian characters...
...Admiral's sense of humor is more Minsky than Gilbertian: the gunrooms and wardrooms that housed him and his mates were no places for sisters, cousins or aunts. Even as a midshipman he was a hearty: sometimes the sea made him sick, but never thoughts of home. He has not forgotten the name of a single one of his ships, or where they took him-the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Bering-Sea, the South Seas-and every ship, cruise and station gave him an anecdote-souvenir to tuck away in his sea chest...
...beginning as harmless a bit of Gilbertian whimsy as was ever conceived by Princeton minds, the movement has suddenly turned serious, to the surprise of every one including its founders. With the promise of Representative Maverick to introduce their bill into Congress and the humorless protest of the Gold Star Mothers, childish things have been put aside, and the Veterans of Future Wars become full-fledged lobbyists in their own right...
Since it is Navy tradition that an admiral is almost never wrong, the Lords of the Admiralty could not bring themselves last week to do more than adopt the Gilbertian attitude: "What, never? Well, hardly ever...