Word: mawkish
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While most of this yarn is expertly comical, Linklater's Scots satire does not sustain the brilliance of, say, Honor Tracy's jape at the Irish, The Straight and Narrow Path. Too many other elements (including Yacky Doo's mawkish death) intrude on the story's essential mixture of fondness and malice. But Author Linklater's entertainment survives its flaws. His most effective jest is at the expense of the reader who, eager to read the imaginary Burns erotica, leafs ahead to find some. The novel is salted with verses, but most of them...
...young poet who represents innocence against both its opposites is an egregious failure. He spouts fine writing of one sort or another almost every moment he is on stage, and makes himself constantly obnoxious by being out of period and out of it generally: a verbose, stupid, and mawkish...
...remake, splashed with incongruously cheery color, has the phony patina of Palm Springs. The sets and scenery (some of it filmed in Bavaria) suggest a Victor Herbert operetta rather than German bourgeois society. And the hardbitten, even morbid truths hammered home in the German version become soft and mawkish half-truths under the hand of Hollywood's Edward Dmytryk, who has consented to a happy ending that makes the teacher's tragedy merely pathetic...
These dangers of Nouveau decoration, unessential detail and "beautification," can be found throughout the works of the minor artists who derived their inspiration directly from the decorative school. Not only is Peter Behren's The Kiss a shamelessly mawkish print, but almost the entire picture surface is covered by the grotesque stylized tresses of the lovers' hair...
...magazine field, the American Mercury has done a flip-flop from the iconoclastic days of H. L. Mencken, and in September 1957, a strongly worded article entitled "Harvard Betrays its Heritage" appeared under the byline of Harold Lord Varney, managing editor. Criticizing the Harvard Corporation for its "mawkish tolerance of communism," Varney spoke of "intellectual mushiness," and concluded that the College had "fallen into an era of little men and little men and little safety haunted minds at the Harvard summit...