Word: mots
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...light verse and anecdotal magazine pieces, plays and books, the best known of which was her 1942 travelogue, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written with Emily Kimbrough. She was a popular guest on radio, television and the lecture circuit, thanks largely to her flair for the bon mot. Sample: "A woman's virtue is man's greatest invention...
...London, David Mun-row, conductor; Angel). A fascinating col lection of sacred and profane music by nine little-known Italian composers of the 16th and early 17th centuries, performed on such authentic instruments as sackbut, recorder and shawm. As usual with the Consort, the playing (and in the mot ets, singing) is of the highest quality...
...Garth revels in his labors and savors his influence both during and after campaigns, just as he enjoys his own façade as the rat-tat-tat tough guy, breaking off aphorisms between puffs on his twisted black cigar. (Typical mot: "Reality dictates your strategy. There are no brilliant choices in most situations.") At 47, he conveys an impression of boundless energy in search of new elections, new impact. Indeed, what distinguishes Garth from other political consultants is his influence on some clients after they have won and his immersion in their campaigns. He plots the candidates' advertising...
...pencil-nosed naïf Michael J. Doonesbury, a founding member of the Walden Puddle Commune and an armchair liberal who spends much of his time, quite literally in an armchair, sampling the world's lunacy from television newscasts. He seems to have a gift for the mal mot, telling a menacing group of black separatists, "Hey, ol' Martin Luther King was one heck of a fellah, wasn't he?" or informing a $65,000-a-year rock entrepreneur in California that "back East you 'Frisco hipsters are kind of legendary, living off the land...
...buttocks." ("Buttocks that are fat" yields steatopygia-which is a different matter altogether.) Bernstein's backward dictionary is a kind of combination thesaurus and crossword-puzzle dictionary. It gives only the "target" words, not their pronunciations and derivations. For moments of verbal parapraxis the deipnosophist seeking just the mot juste (ulotrichous? schlep?) may wish to keep it handy. Too frequent a reliance on the book, however, may have the reader sounding like William F. Buckley...