Word: offhand
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...reporter's question. A wave, a smile, a one-liner: just what the networks need. The great thing about such scenes is that though Reagan may have memorized what he wants to say to a question he knows will be asked, the line can be charitably judged as offhand in phrasing and thought, something that isn't really a formal statement of policy. And therefore frustrating, not alone to reporters, but to anyone who hopes for a clearer reading of the President's mind...
Although he tries to limit his criticism to Islam's political extensions, its alarms and excursions, he begins sniping at the religion itself: here, an offhand reference to the "open-and-shut morality of Islam," there, a disparaging allusion to the devotional habits of its most fervent believers, "the five-times-a-day prayers, the unnecessary fasts." He forgets that all religious observances are "unnecessary," except to those who practice them. In his judgments of the new fundamentalism, he begins to sound as harsh as any ayatullah railing at the great satan in the West: "This political Islam...
...formation--and subsequent development--of Harvard Real Estate Inc. is a classic story about a changing university. For decades, Harvard's non-academic holdings--homes, apartment buildings, stores and offices--were managed in a low-key, almost offhand way. The University Housing Office nominally ran the buildings; in practice, responsibility for the structures was largely given over to private contractors like Hunneman and Co., which managed the properties. Harvard was anything but an aggresive landlord--"I remember seeing one house, right on the edge of the Square, renting for $200 a month. This was a house, this was 1978, this...
During working hours, McKellen can be found deploying this same unique combination of high art, low cunning and surreptitious showmanship. His incarnation of Play wright Shaffer's antagonist, Antonio Salieri, owes much to the offhand technical virtuosity McKellen displayed in that restaurant and even more to an analytic actor's intelligence that is restless and ruth less at once. "If I couldn't defend a performance intellectually, I'd be very un happy indeed," McKellen remarks, and his Salieri is a seamless reconciliation of paradox. It is a portrait in depth of a shallow...
Theirs is an ignorance of the impact of faculty members' offhand remarks, like the Native American joke one professor opened his course with last year, a gesture that prompted a handful of students to walk...