Word: miens
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...debt to the student riots of the late '60s. A semanticist with an excellent reputation among academics, Hayakawa was approaching retirement age in 1968 when he was made acting president of San Francisco State College. The school had been sundered by violent demonstrations. Short, normally mild of mien and sporting a tam-o'-shanter, Hayakawa became an instant celebrity when he summoned riot police to the campus and suppressed the radical uprising. At one point the scholar personally ripped the wires from the protesters' public address system in mid-diatribe. Today he says: "I had to become...
Heavy Accent. As for Giscard himself, he responded to President Ford's welcoming remarks with a friendly gesture that would have dismayed one of his predecessors, Charles de Gaulle, who maintained a haughtily arrogant mien throughout his eight-day visit to the U.S. in 1960. Turning to Ford, Giscard said, "Now, Mr. President, permit me to be my own interpreter," and he proceeded to give his nation's greetings entirely in English. When he spoke of both countries' "identical passion for independence and liberty," it was with a heavy accent. But President Giscard had gone...
...Donleavy an inverted romanticism, a genuine attachment to the order and chivalry of the aristocracy, a sadness that living is not what he would conceive it or hope it to be. In the jacket photo, Donleavy's face is wary, truculent even, thoroughly distrustful. You suspect the jaunty mien, the gentlemanly deportment, is a carefully constructed guise. "I live and draw a flow of gold," Balthazar B thinks to himself, "from a dead father's reservoir of riches. Behind my own lonely elegance. Where no one will ever again get to know me. And speak less and less." Donleavy...
...J.F.K. Once, sitting next to Kennedy at a horse show, the author remarked on how easy it would be for a marksman to assassinate the President. Vidal then added that he would probably be hit instead. "No great loss," Kennedy joked. But Vidal's snappish wit and lofty mien were not the virtues of a loyal flatterer. Robert Kennedy distrusted and disliked him. During a White House party, Bobby flared when Vidal laid a brotherly hand on Jackie. Insults were exchanged, and Gore was banished from the court. He later struck back in print with fulminations like "The Holy...
...gullible when a trumped-up letter purports to disclose that the lady Olivia, whom he serves as a kind of steward, is desperately in love with him. Bedford purses his lips as if his mouth were pickled in brine. He walks with the gravity of a frozen penguin. His mien alternates between a mask of hauteur and a tickled-pink grin of uncontainable self-adulation. As an actor, he takes the treacherous gamble of playing directly to the audience and makes it pay off in total delight...