Word: middlebrows
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...profits tumbled 28% in 1974, it was all too obvious why. Seeking a fashion image, the company had been stocking and advertising higher-priced goods; when the recession suddenly made shoppers price conscious, Sears was stuck with unsold inventories, and discount merchandisers like K mart successfully invaded its old middlebrow market. Since then, Sears has shifted back into its traditional niche between the low-priced stores and the fashion shops, largely at the urging of Senior Executive Vice President Edward R. Telling. Last week Telling, 58, got his reward: a committee of directors chose him to take over from Arthur...
...Evening News Correspondent Andrew Roth. In Roth's updated pocket guide, Andrew Faulds, a Labor M.P. and former actor, is dismissed as "tall, bearded, rude, sextrovert." Conservative Leader Margaret Thatcher rates a more splendid oxymoron: "blonde, stainless-steel Dresden china." Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe is characterized as a "middlebrow, U.S.-style show-biz politician." Because almost a quarter of the 635 seats in the Commons changed during last year's two elections, Roth's directory has grown increasingly useful to Parliament watchers. His only concession to propriety, however, has been to adjust his use of the King...
...similar bargains with Swan, juicily played by Paul Williams, who also composed the film's good score. Swan in turn owes his power to an earlier Faustian deal of his own, a pact that borrows a few wrinkles from Dorian Gray's compact. This repetition reduces contemporary middlebrow mythomania to absurd shambles...
...middle-class or middlebrow, even for those prop erly defined as belonging to either group, often seems conventional, complacent and confining, which may be why their tastes in books and movies run ? at a safe distance from reality ? to behavior or opinions more blatant than their own. Middle leads naturally to mediocre, a word that takes its roots from what is middling and therefore ordinary. Yet Aristotle, judging the temperaments of men, exalted the intermediate and argued that anything more extreme was either excess or defect. To him there was, for example, a desirable quality called bravery...
...dogma of equality of results turns up some bizarre arguments. In his recent book More Equality, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, draws up a scenario for "cultural equality" that would eliminate "invidious status and other distinctions between 'highbrow,' 'middlebrow' and 'lowbrow' levels of taste." "A culturally equal society," writes Gans approvingly, "would thus treat all ways of expressing oneself and acting as equal in value, status and moral worth." But why should a taste for Lawrence Welk instead of Pablo Casals, or Jacqueline Susann instead of James Joyce, be held of equal...