Word: idiots
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Dealing with an inarticulate character complicates a novelist's job. In his second book, Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling) takes on two such men and manages to turn them into believable antagonists. The first is Semple, a near-idiot high school boy. Words have little meaning for him; he misreads reality and then forgets it anyway. His attempts at speech are usually glottal grunts. His writing is chicken tracks. There is only one coherent current in his life: his destructive fascination with Harold Hunt, "the ringleader of the hard gang" at school...
...during the years he played the striptease joints. When the crowd yelled "Bring on the girls!" he would single out a heckler and ask: "You, sir, are you married? You never will be with that roller-derby jacket. What's your name? You don't know, you idiot-well, look inside your coat!" Or if the guy had a date, he would look at her and sadly inquire, "Was anyone else hurt in the accident?" Though Rickles has been fired from half a dozen clubs and was once sued by a woman for ridiculing her hat as "suitable...
...Paul A. Samuelson, professor of Economics at M.I.T., said last night that although De Gaulle's chief advisor was "an idiot," his programs were "not without merit." He also wrote in a Washington Post article that the British devaluation should have come three years earlier, when the Laborites "could have thrown the blame on the Tories...
...observed that a lot of guys who were idiots made millions of dollars. With my background and the confidence that I wasn't an idiot, I figured that I could do as well and get rich...
...tape is likely to force professors to specialize more: one may become the stirring lecturer, another a skilled lab-type demonstrator, another an inspiring seminar leader. After years of academic pressure to get into college, many students resent being asked to sit in front of what they consider "an idiot box"-even if a genius is on the screen...