Word: impish
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...rewritten the canons of beauty. A daughter of the Bay of Naples, she has within her the blood of the Saracens, Spaniards, Normans, Byzantines and Greeks. The East appears in her slanting eyes. Her dark brown hair is a bazaar of rare silk. Her legs talk. In her impish, ribald Neapolitan laughter, she epitomizes the Capriccio Italien that Tchaikovsky must have had in mind. Lord Byron, in her honor, probably sits up in his grave about once a week and rededicates his homage to "Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty." Vogue Magazine once fell...
...morning broke each workday last week over the pleasant St. Louis suburb of University City, an impish-looking, tire-waisted man gingerly eased himself into a tub of steaming hot water and submerged right up to his jug-handle ears. For most men, the solitary ritual of the tub means a chance to escape for a while from the cares and worries of the world outside-but not for William Henry Mauldin, editorial cartoonist of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In Mauldin's cauldron, the heat creates light-in the form of inspiration for his drawing board. The water...
Miss Lansbury is the actress in closest contact with the audience. She jokes with them, confides in them, and shrugs to them. They understand her; they are akin to her. Meanwhile, Miss Plowright states Jo's accusations with impish humor; the audience laughs as they listen to her. Jo literally takes her mother to task for "ruining her life;" but her statement of sorrow, of being orphaned is made in such a childlike, inoffensive manner that its impact is not felt until the conclusion. Here the depths of Jo's anguish and the great meaning of her being alone...
Peter and the Wolf (Beatrice Lillie; London Symphony Orchestra; London). The ineffable Bea seems to take Prokofiev's fable with what Max Beerbohm called "a stalactite of salt." Her impish spoofery is just what this staid and somewhat self-conscious classic now needs...
...Greek myth and history, Durrell is quick to relish the durable, often superstitious, links with the pagan past. In Rhodes, the peasants believe that a child conceived on March 25 must be born on Christmas Eve and will inevitably turn out to be a Kaous. A Kaous is an impish little devil, complete with horns, hoofs and pointed ears, descended from Pan. He circulates after dark, croaking, "Feathers or lead?" Either answer may be wrong, after which the Kaous mounts his victim like a horse for a breakneck ride across country, lashing him all the while with a stick...