Word: oafishly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chivalric logic collapses, and masculinity itself becomes a horror--all rage and aggression and reptilian brain. Viet Nam changed American notions about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. In the '60s, during the great violence of the war, masculine power came to be subtly discredited in many circles as oafish and destructive. The heritage of the Enlightenment (the scientific method, progress, that dreamy Jeffersonian clarity of mind that told us all problems could be solved) now seemed drawn into a darker business. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the essential American soul was "hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer...
What Martin believes in-and her book on children encompasses the full range of adult behavior as well-is that "we are all born ignorant and oafish," and it is the duty of all parents to teach their younger selves how to behave properly. The only way to do so, she says, is by providing a good example plus tireless nagging. "It takes 18 years of constant work to get [a child] into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands," she announces. The child must be taught not just to say thank...
Some of the same faces were there Saturday. I high-fived a Harvard comrade as large chunks of loose turf flew over my head. Two feet away, on oafish prep was scuffling with the Yale security guards, who had begun to realize the fertility of their presence...
...from abroad and Japanizing them. A facile people, living in the present and the immediate future, a sharp trading race. The truth, almost surely, is an amalgamation of the two perceptions. That is only fitting. Japan is a masterpiece of contradictions, of East and West, of exquisite politesse and oafish rudeness, of a certain lacquered arrogance combined with a strange insecurity in the presence of things foreign...
...every unseen movie is a masterpiece, as Success amiably proves. Its oafish hero Harry (Bridges) cannot seem to get the attention of his pretty, dotty wife (Belinda Bauer). They have sex every Friday; in between she chats with her cats and practices ballet before her favorite companion, a full-length mirror. So Harry gives himself another life, in the guise of a swaggering gangster named Mack. Suddenly, love and the perfect swindle are his for the daring. This is a cynical fairy tale that must be told with buoyancy of spirit; Richert's gift is for earthbound madness...