Word: glumness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Today, many believe that the American language has lost not only its melody but a lot of its meaning. Schoolchildren and even college students often seem disastrously ignorant of words; they stare, uncomprehending, at simple declarative English. Leon Botstein, president of New York's Bard College, says with glum hyperbole: "The English language is dying, because it is not taught. " Others believe that the language is taught badly and learned badly because American culture is awash with clichés, officialese, political bilge, the surreal boobspeak of advertising ("Mr. Whipple please don't squeeze the cortex...
Last year when things looked glum, Andy Warhol's gossip sheet Interview defined a new figure in society: the millionette. Now these "rich young brats" have succeeded café society, the jet set and the beautiful people as social pacesetters. To emulate them, however, requires a lot of loot. Take the personification of the ideal, Nicky Lane, 23, a dégagée Englishwoman with fire-engine red hair, matte-white face and enormous carnelian eyes. "She looks like an apricot," says her whimsical husband Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume-jewelry designer. Nicky is what Cole Porter liked...
...news was equally glum on business and consumer spending. The Conference Board, a research group, reported that big manufacturers in the first quarter reduced appropriations for capital spending 9.4% below the fourth quarter of 1974, which was down 26% from the previous three months. That marked the steepest six-month slide in 17 years. For all this year, the Commerce Department announced, businessmen expect to spend $114 billion for new plant and equipment, a puny 1.6% more than in 1974. Such spending rose 13% in both...
...long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons "suitable for people with a glum view of life...
Truth and Beauty. A glum view of life at The New Yorker! Gill does not dwell on this paradox, but it is not hard to explain. Ross, Shawn and the rest have successfully set up as taste makers over a 50-year period when cultural presumptions have changed horrendously. The New Yorker remains a throwback to Matthew Arnold's Victorian faith in a secular religion of truth and beauty. Eustace Tilley, the magazine's monocled symbol, is clearly an Arnold disciple turned dandy. To be impeccable, graceful and hard-hitting all at the same time is demanding work...