Word: oomph
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Actress Kerr added to the season's fine stockpile of feminine oomph. Heading the list was Audrey Hepburn, who, as the mermaid of Jean Giraudoux's rather waterlogged Ondine, proved a sprite that never was on sea or land. Equally near (though never under) the water, Shirley Booth was the principal lure of By the Beautiful Sea, while France's Jeanmaire brought something boyish, girlish and impish to the lumpish Girl in Pink Tights...
When a movie star is billed as having "it" or "oomph," what she probably has is heterosis (hybrid vigor). At least, that is what Geneticist George D. Snell says. In the current Quarterly Review of Biology, Snell assembles evidence to show that superior qualities in humans, including physical attractiveness, are often due to heterosis, resulting from the crossing of two strains...
...specter of TV, beset by mounting production costs, harried by a falling box office, Hollywood is also facing an unexpected shortage in its most vital commodity of all-the mysterious attraction that everybody recognizes but no one has ever .been able to label more accurately than glamor, or oomph...
What happened to glamor, to oomph...
Back in Boston for the first time since she declared war on Harvard ten years ago when the Lampoon voted her the movie star least likely to succeed, onetime Oomph Girl Ann Sheridan was in a mellow, forgiving mood. "I'm not worried any more about what Harvard University thinks of me ... By the way whatever happened to that editor? It would be interesting to know what he is doing...