Word: mock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which the priest persuaded a German officer in World War II to execute him for acts committed by others. The present novel begins by reducing that sacrifice to irony. Perhaps as a symbolic agent for the humbling of Don Ardito's spiritual pride, the German officer stages a mock execution of the priest, complete with firing squad and blank cartridges, before shipping him off to a prison camp. In that moment Don Ardito suffers a murky but traumatic lapse of faith. Stripped of his calling, as he sees it, the priest no longer says Mass. Ceasing to pray...
Another tilt with the law proved more serious. Hulme was sent down from Cambridge for punching a policeman. He left town astride a coffin in an undergraduate mock funeral. Disowned by his family, he spent eight months roughing it across Canada. The vast sky and the flat horizon-reaching grasslands left him with a numbing sense of oppression, "the fright of the mind before the unknown" that he came to believe "created not only the first gods, but also the first...
...exactly a pajama game. As Mark Twain and Rodgers & Hart had done with Connecticut Yankee, one method would have been to mock the legend with pure comedy. Others have played it straight an impressive list that includes Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace. Layamon, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and now Alan Jay Lerner. In Camelot, he necessarily left out some of the legend's great characters: Sir Kay the Seneschal, Tristram and Isolde, Elaine the lily-maid of Astolat, even Sir Galahad, the squarest knight at the Round Table...
Wilson read the trivia with almost mock care: "Senator Kennedy went out on the front lawn with his daughter Caroline and her dog, Charlie--C-H-A-R-L-I-E." Various members of the clan, he said, had been hiking and playing touch football, next to politics, the favorite Kennedy sport. He read exact direct quotes of the most inconsequential nature: Jack to his brother Teddy, "What do you say, Teddy? Do you want to take a walk on the beach?" Neighbors to the Senator: "Hi, Jack. We're awfully proud...
Unfortunately, Ulbricht & Co. were in too big a hurry to get out front. When Nikita Khrushchev dropped in at the Leipzig Trade Fair in the spring of 1958, a life-sized mock-up of the 68-152 was one of the main attractions. Ulbricht could contain himself no longer. Over the protests of his engineers, who insisted the plane needed significant changes in fuselage and engine design, Ulbricht ordered the first prototype 66-152 into the air. Minutes after it took off, the jetliner crashed into a hillside, killing its four crew members...