Word: hick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are a couple of false notes. Though the setting is Michigan, the hick accents seem to have wandered up from somewhere near Little Rock. The early scenes of Francine and Mickey's courtship depend too predictably on '60s pop songs for period flavor. But most of the details ring true, from the woefully inadequate bromides offered by elders ("a woman's got to take the bitter with the sweet, you know") to the constant background din created by the children, to the way Mickey childishly brandishes his fists at his cowering wife, a neighborhood bully grown...
...told LIFE magazine that he bought a Rolls-Royce because its powder-blue paint job matched his wife's favorite hat. Then there was H.L. Hunt, who, a Dallas editor once said, "would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn't such a damn hick...
Detroit Policeman Raymond Cruz of City Primeval (1980), for instance, is mistaken for a high school shop teacher by a girl he tries to pick up in a bar. Ernest Stickley Jr. is a dour Oklahoma hick who, in Swag (1976), conducts a doomed 100-day armed-robbery career. Resurfacing in Stick, seven years and a prison stretch later, he has scarcely improved; he worships Actor Warren Oates and thinks disco is dynamite. But, like all of Leonard's main men, deep down he is as incorrodable as a zinc bar and as heady as the stuff...
...simply a group of stories sharing a common protagonist? Is its leading man, John Everett, a modern knight errant sacrificing himself to obsolete notions of romantic love? Or is he merely a maundering hick, caroming off women who easily recognize the traits of a user? Is his creator, Robert Hemenway, an artist of light-meter sensitivity? Or is he simply a construction worker employing the worn materials of bromides and reveries...
...came here not only because Canton and Potsdam, N.Y. are two of the Earth's most god-forsaken hick towns, but because the Crimson is in deep trouble...