Word: one-upmanship
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...friend back home. The film's only function is to provide Murphy with the opportunity to work a dozen or so variations on his familiar and oddly endearing routine: top Whitey. All of white America is a classroom for Fast Eddie's crash course in street smarts and larcenous one-upmanship. And everyone loves it, in the movie and in the audience, because Murphy's jive is blessedly free of malice. Under the ghetto gutter talk lurks a sassy little boy, outfoxing the grownups at a game he has been practicing all his life. He % is a Little Rascal playing...
Dining-room one-upmanship...
...players seen through the blue gauze remind the audience of the play's links with Hamlet and with tragedy--when the down-at-the-heel band of players doubles as Denmark's familiar royal family. The troup's leader (Kevin Jennings) confronts the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a one-upmanship that never flags. As both the king and the head Player. Jennings plays with vigor and consistency the role of crafty manipulator, impressing upon the audience Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's powerlessness to control their fate...
...high court's first woman justice, but also the first to be taken directly from judicial ranks as low as a state appellate court. Many women's leaders have protested O'Connor's passive stances on women's rights. Another example: Michigan Republicans and Democrats last month engaged in one-upmanship in assembling their tickets for the November elections. Seeking women's votes, the GOP gubernatorial nominee asked three women before finally finding one to run on his ticket for secretary of state. The next week, word got out that the head of the Democratic ticket was explicitly looking...
Approach #4. The Cultivated Superiority Approach. Prerequisite: before you arrive in Cambridge, compile a list of things that you have done or that your family owns that are sure to impress anybody. A subdivision of this is Intellectual One-Upmanship. If your new roommate has read all of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, come right back at him with your A.P. scores (fours are dull), or your knowledge of physical chemistry. Lying is permissable, because no one will ever know the difference if you can effectively fake it. Make pronouncements about everything. Wear a lot of preppie...