Word: mope
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...label should be at least binary, like Dickens' "the best of + times, the worst of times," again no metaphor. It is a fallacy to think there is one theme. Like all ages, it is a time of angels and moping dogs -- after Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines: "It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs...
...Rothstein shouldn't mope. Lousy teams can gain respectability as quickly as you can say, "The Chicago Bulls select Michael Jordan...
...Dewitt did not mope, for he resolved to break that habit...
Gielgud directed a Hamlet in which Guinness had a small part, and he can still hear that berating voice -- "like a silver trumpet muffled in silk." "Go away," he told Guinness crossly. "Come back in a week. Get someone to teach you how to act." Guinness did nothing except mope for seven days, but his absence was enough. Gielgud was now delighted with the young actor's new interpretation...
That may be because not much actually happens. Gilbert and Johanna mope around Germany while her aristocratic Prussian parents try to persuade them both of their un conscionable folly. Dead ends are followed by standoffs. In the interims, Lawrence chats: "How a Times critic dropped on me for using the word toney! I'm sure I never knew it wasn't toney any more to say toney." And he preaches, "Let us confess our belief: our deep, our religious belief. The great eternity of creation does not lie in the spirit, in the ideal. It lies...