Word: impromptu
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...Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the definition of obscenity, performers were able to use whatever words they chose. Bruce, the gifted, tortured pioneer of this mode, aptly titled his autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. In the book's foreword, critic Kenneth Tynan praised Bruce as "an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private." But Bruce suffered for that trust. His scabrous truth telling got him arrested in the U.S. and evicted from Britain. He died in 1966, perhaps the last American...
This sad incident brings to mind the words of another historian, named Douglass Adair, who once had the gall to admit the low priority he and his fellow historians place on teaching. In a somewhat impromptu speech at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians 25 years ago, Adair confided his feelings about teaching to his fellow historians. The "semi-educated adolescents" (that's us, the students) may be won over by the "low arts of pedagogical showmanship," said Adair. Essentially, any historian worth his dissertation topic would admit that research and not teaching is the distinguishing feature...
Most Popular Entertainment. For a time it seemed that dining out had supplanted baseball or moviegoing as the all-American pastime. Trendy, self- styled trattorias and bistros, with provocative menus and often with fanciful decorative themes devised by hip designers, became a form of impromptu theater for tuned-in young foodies and grazers. Two years ago, some of the diners-out began to drop out, abandoning the scene to turn into couch potatoes. But their need for instant, easy sustenance fostered another trend: take-out food...
...party: hip, hyperkinetic and hot. The host can't sit still, and the crowd can't get enough of him. At any moment, Hall might race into the studio audience in response to a shouting fan, or sidle over to his five-piece house band ("my posse") for some impromptu jamming. Meanwhile, as late-night's first successful black talk host, he has turned his guest couch into TV's liveliest melting pot. Rap groups get as much attention as Hollywood legends; George Hamilton or Glenn Close might find themselves rubbing elbows with one of the Jacksons -- Jesse...
...times the proceedings looked more like a tragicomedy than a federal criminal trial. First a Government witness fainted on the stand, then the defendant suffered a hallucinatory breakdown and was carted off for psychiatric tests. Even nature played an impromptu walk-on part as Hurricane Hugo temporarily suspended the federal trial in Charlotte...