Word: offhand
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Further fine-tunings of what hipness might mean became an offhand intellectual pursuit of the '50s. In a commentary on his much discussed 1957 essay, The White Negro, Norman Mailer distinguished between the lower-class origins of the people he termed "hipsters" and the middle-class, college- educated, moralizing Beats. But he figured they both shared "marijuana, jazz, not much money and a community of feeling that society is the prison of the nervous system...
Compared with such important works by Wills as Lincoln at Gettysburg or Nixon Agonistes, Certain Trumpets has an offhand quality; it resembles an actor's phoned-in performance. There are also moments when Wills strains mightily to make a case, notably in the chapter on Perot. Wills argues that Perot, who built Electronic Data Systems into a multibillion-dollar enterprise before peddling it to GM, improved on the theories of two corporate legends who made salesmanship a near science: John Henry Patterson of National Cash Register and Thomas Watson of IBM. Perhaps so, but even by Wills' narrow definition...
...gotten no information about this and I'vebeen trying. So far, every lab director [at theEnergy Department] has been told to look forexperiments where radiation might have been used.But no lab director knows what happened 30 yearsago offhand. At the bottom of someone's file is awhole lot of stuff that no one's sorted through tofind out what it all means...
...death left the White House staff wandering around glassy-eyed in disbelief, with those who knew him best searching their memories for the offhand remark, the telling anecdote that would illuminate what Foster kept hidden. Skip Rutherford, an aide to chief of staff Mack McLarty, recalls a conversation a week earlier when Foster said, "No one back in Little Rock could know how hard this is." Purvis remembers Foster's description of his days. "You try to be at work by 7 in the morning and sometimes it's 10 at night when you walk out just dog-tired. About...
...horn was no more a stunt than all his roguish jokiness though. The music flowed from a kind of high spirit, a purposeful passion that the horn symbolized and the silliness deflected. There was nothing slight or offhand about the way he played, or how he lived. Born in South Carolina in 1917, he began to teach himself trombone and trumpet two years after his father -- a bricklayer by trade and a weekend bandleader by calling -- had passed on; before he left his teens he was playing professionally with the Frankie Fairfax band and had got himself his nickname...