Word: mucking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With running starts, the two took turns hurling themselves through the muck. They would emerge, caked with dirt and grass but grinning wildly, and dive through the mud again...
...looking forward to watching some of the younger, liberal Democratic turks who will snag sub-committee chairmanships start raising some muck about, let's say, Reagan's Central America quagmire. And maybe now that he doesn't chair a major committee, people won't listen when Jesse Helms talks. Is this all reason for rejoicing? Yeah. Is it cause for a complacent, more-of-the-same approach...
...novel was a deliciously complex academician's joke: a multiple- murder mystery set in the Middle Ages and starring a Sherlockian monk with the mind-set of a modern semiotician. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud's pale "palimpsest" of the novel opts instead for rolling around in the muck, blood and superstitions of primitive societies -- a sort of Quest for Friar. Annaud goes about his task with the self-satisfied air of an anthropology professor shocking the freshmen out of their complacency. His reversal of the tale's priorities dulls its point and dims the mature, intelligent presence of Sean Connery...
...being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction that drives literate people toward Judith Krantz. "This muck cripples consciousness," he proclaimed of pop in 1968. "Therefore no concessions should be made to it." Sorry. Concessions were made. "By the late 1960s," writes Princeton Scholar Louis Menand, "popular culture had permeated every aspect of life with an inexorability that was beyond the powers of any sort of intellectual antagonism...
...divided between traditionally attired and silent females and the Westernized (read: loud) and self-satisfied males. Nasser himself remains an important hair's breadth away from merely detestable because he retains a sense of brotherly loyalty and an affectionate nature--although he does deal in very detestable and profitable muck. The real villain is Nasser's right-hand man, the fully macho Salim, who smuggles drugs and handles the rough stuff of the business...