Word: hollowing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diapers, answering mail, hollering at children, pulling weeds, charcoaling hamburgers, dashing to church and watching TV (with snide comments, so people will know we're really too intelligent for TV). If Mr. Gunther knows of any place here in Ohio where some of that deplorable sin and dreary, hollow fun is going on, could he please let us know-soon? If possible, before next weekend...
Dark suspicions arise that the current oversupply of books proving that Everything Is Hollow (or: A Searching Look at the Cardboard Values of Our Aspirin Society) is part of a plot by the sunshine merchants. When everyone is sufficiently depressed, publishers of inspirational texts will find a renewed market for books disproving hollowness on the ground that Everything Is Stuffed with Meaning. Meanwhile, in the hollow or waning-moon part of the cycle, we have had The Waste Makers, The Pyramid Climbers, The Brain Pickers, The Naked Society, and that inevitable-but-yet-unwritten examination of the lunch habits...
...What counts as an "activity"? Brushing your teeth? Mowing the lawn with a toy gasoline tractor? If five members of one of Dr. Wylie's families watch Gunsmoke, does the researcher chalk up five activities? This is an important element in the art of making the world sound hollow when it is thumped. Another is the unvarying assumption that no one ever does anything because he likes it. If he goes skiing, it is to show off his wounds; if he gives a party, it is to prove something to his friends; if he goes bunburying with his secretary...
Since there is almost no human activity that cannot be accomplished, attempted, contemplated, or escaped from on a weekend, Gunther has a lot to cover. Or to look at it another way, he has endless opportunities to quote from other Hollow Worlders whose subjects are more specialized. His book is, in fact, an anthology of the maxims of Russell Lynes, David Riesman, Helen Gurley Brown, Vance Packard, Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte...
Paul Schmidt and Lynn Milgrim (Orestes and Electra) have nearly half the play's lines; and both are, for the most part, striking. Schmidt must make plausible a wide range of moods--from grieving madness and whispering weakness to hollow posturing and bloody rage. His resonant voice and liquid movements aid him in rendering realistic the avenger-turned-criminal...