Word: offhand
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dishonest intentions or botched executions. He acknowledges one novelist's gradations of ineptitude: "She began several years ago with writing unmitigated nonsense, and she now writes nonsense very sensibly mitigated." He praises with faint damns a pamphlet composed by the painter James McNeill Whistler, who "writes in an offhand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French--a style which might be called familiar if one often encountered anything like it." Holding at arm's length a novel by Louisa May Alcott (Eight Cousins: or, the Aunt-Hill), he mentions the opinion of some foreigners that American children are ill- behaved...
...city's school system, third largest in the U.S. with 430,000 students, was shut down by a teachers' strike, the second in two years. Black and Hispanic youth gangs have kept up their amazing homicidal pace, killing six people in the two weeks since the offhand murder of Ben Wilson, a local high school basketball superstar, shocked and disturbed the city. Groups of white thugs have been attacking the homes of black and Hispanic families who dared to live among them. At city hall, the confrontation is more formalized and less violent, but it continues to muck...
That Tartikoff was able to survive so long and eventually prevail in a notoriously precarious job is just one of many anomalies about him. A graduate of Yale, where he majored in English, Tartikoff, 35, has the wit and offhand manner of a hip assistant professor. In the office he often appears in crew-neck sweaters and never wears a watch. The modest three-bedroom home where he lives with his wife Lilly and daughter lacks such California status symbols as a swimming pool and tennis court. During off-hours, Tartikoff enjoys shooting baskets (on his one extravagance, a home...
...three of them meet up in Cleveland, then drive to Florida for two improbable plot twists. There are only 67 shots, each separated from the next by a few seconds of blackness, and three funny bits. Artfully done, with offhand references to directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted...
...repeatedly lied to FBI investigators. At the same time, she solicited a meeting with attorneys for Hiss in the hope of giving aid and support. The encounter was a disaster. The lawyers were appalled by Herbst's offhand attitude about espionage. In their notes they observed that she had "no real concern about people working for the Government, taking papers and supplying information surreptitiously to the Communist Party." Later Herbst confided to a friend, "The Hiss case was handled wrongly....as indeed I suggested to his lawyers all along. He should have been more frank... Admitting smaller things would...