Word: oneupmanship
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...fashionable switch of Peanuts is that good ole Charlie Brown and his friends speak the sophisticated baby babble of the age-popularized psychology. Charlie (Gary Burghoff) has a way of putting himself down before the world does, a sly self-pitying form of oneupmanship. His shrew is Lucy (Reva Rose)-crabby and domineering; another is fussbudget Patty (Karen Johnson). His soul mate is Snoopy (Bill Hinnant), the dog who lies atop the doghouse that Charlie is always...
...even managed to insert an amendment in a public-works bill that authorizes the President to impound 20% of the funds Congress allows for domestic programs because of the "unpredictability" of the war in Viet Nam. The Senate approved it, even though it was simply a Dirksen exercise in oneupmanship. If the House agrees, the President, who has always had the power to withhold congressionally appropriated funds, will in consequence have more trouble repeating his favorite alibi that larger expenses are the fault of Congress...
...political troubleshooter, Bundy nonetheless proved a valuable link between the worlds of intellect and action. His most notable public service to the Johnson Administration occurred last summer during the early campus-based protests against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. Applying a scathingly articulate scorn honed by years of campus oneupmanship, Bundy met the critics on their own ground. "I think many of them have been wrong in earlier moments of stress and danger," he declared. "I think many of them misunderstand the hard realities of this dangerous world...
Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry...
...another brother, Michael, is the enfant terrible of Labor's left wing. "We liked to work to the rule, 'Let not the left Foot know what the right Foot doeth,' " cracks Hugh. Yet the family always preserved a merry unity through a running game of intellectual oneupmanship. One famous parry came in 1958, when Sir Hugh was trying desperately to halt the internecine war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Suddenly, he received a cryptic cable from his father: SEE SECOND CORINTHIANS FOUR VERSES EIGHT AND NINE. *Delighted, Sir Hugh cabled back: SEE ROMANS FIVE VERSES THREE...