Word: libbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) took a job wrapping chocolates; as the candies hurtled past on a conveyor belt, the hapless duo tried to keep pace by stuffing half of them into their mouths. Seeking to emulate a pioneer woman, Lucy opened an oven to remove freshly...
...Rose Garden rubbish." Up to now that richly evocative phrase has been used exclusively to describe what political lexicographer William Safire calls the "supposedly ad-lib remarks made by the President on minor occasions." But that was before George Bush and a phalanx of congressional leaders strolled into the Rose Garden last Friday morning to announce that they had hammered out the 1990 budget concordat. Now, in updated fashion, Rose Garden rubbish can also be defined as "the unveiling of a cynical, bipartisan arrangement to avoid difficult decisions on the deficit through the use of artful arithmetic, Panglossian projections...
...play's second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech to the alumnae of the prep school she once attended. Slowly the successful veneer of Heidi's life is stripped away as she tries to ad-lib a free-form answer to the assigned topic, "Women, Where Are We Going?" Heidi's soliloquy ends with these words: "I don't blame any of us. We're all concerned, intelligent, good women." Pause. "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought that the whole point was that...
...volume of a lexicon turning into Latin some 15,000 phrases that did not exist in the time of Cicero and Caesar. Among the neologisms from the complete opus: ampla rerum venalium domus (supermarket), ignitabulum nicotianum (cigarette lighter), nuntius fulminans (news flash) and mulierum liberatio (women's lib). Beams Abbot Egger, who is also the editor of a Latin newspaper: "This is proof; Latin can be used even today for everything...
...character. During the performance I saw, when technical problems caused the sound effects to stop working during the show, Marston led the cast in a total loss of character and presence. In a vain attempt at comedy, Marston, who was speaking at the time, started a five minute ad-lib, which the other actors failed to pick up on. The actors all began laughing and jabbing each other in the ribs...