Word: oneself
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most excesses do not display the exaggerator's art in it's best light: they are merely blurbs and rodomontade. In more complex usage, exaggeration does dynamic and suggestive work: it can be used to frighten or threaten , to reassure(oneself or others),to glorify and debunk, and, above all, to relieve the tedium of life to entertain. Exaggeration is one of the methods of all myth-from Olympian deities to giants like Paul Bunyan and John Henry, to mythic historical figures- Mao, say, or George Patton. A child exaggerates his parents' powers to the point...
...watch Napoleon as Gance did, the perpetual outsider dissecting the world before him with his eyes. "To make oneself understood to people, one must first speak to their eyes." When the film ends, on the eve of his first great victory, he stands above the Italian plains, all the world before him, and we have understood what he sees. His vision lies at his feet. And his eyes are the eyes of France...
...cooking show, his main concern is whether the sliced mushrooms will brown in their lemon-juice bath. At last he can afford to reflect: "The best defense against any moral outrage is patience; wait a moment and something will change: the outrage, he who committed it, or, most often, oneself." The new philosopher soon needs all the patience he can muster...
...analyst whose good-natured fatalism forms the tough core of Malcolm's book: "No one likes to hurt people-to cause them pain, to stand silently by as they suffer . . . That's where the real wear and tear of analysis lies-in this chronic struggle to keep oneself from doing the things that decent people naturally and spontaneously...
...must remind oneself that human beings-actors, actually-are also involved in the enterprise. Carole Bouquet (23, long dark hair, Aegean-blue eyes, lissome frame) is the love interest, and more: a warrior goddess who saves Bond's life at least as often as he saves hers, and a welcome addition to this summer's gallery of can-do heroines. Topol, as the wily Greek smuggler Columbo, should be in the "Guinness Book of Word Wreckers"; he is perhaps the first performer to demonstrate the art of overacting by chewing pistachio nuts...