Word: owlishly
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...classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
...swamp witch messes about with chicken blood and hogs' entrails, and ticks off possibilities. The Good Thing, she cackles, "must be the right function-in' of an organism as it participates in a form, or the fulfillment of a Ideological principle inherent in all matter, or ..." This owlish comedy is a blackface up side-down version of Merlin's routine in T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Merlin, who had all philosophy beneath his pointed hat, kept getting his spells confused. The swamp witch, who seems confused, spouts philosophy as if she were Hegel...
...shades of Freud and Jung, of magic, myth and racial memory, now hover (drearily or provocatively, depending on one's point of view) around any collection of the Brothers Grimm. There is no need to be owlish, however, about the clear fact that fairy tales address with considerable delight some persistent human need, at the very simplest, to half-believe that every life is a mysterious personal adventure worth pursuing to the bitter end. Why? Because -who knows? - every faithful goose girl may become a princess, every mean, usurping maid become a deserving corpse. This fine re-edition...
Died. Joe Flynn, 49, owlish actor who made big waves as the fumbling, cantankerous Captain Binghamton in TV's McHale's Navy; of accidental drowning in his swimming pool; in Los Angeles...
...strength of such engaging fancies, Brooklyn-born Westlake, 41, a softspoken, owlish ectomorph who resembles most of his protagonists, has slipped into the front rank of popular crime writers. Especially in Hollywood, where his plots seem like readymade movie scenarios-so readymade, in fact, that with Cops and Robbers (1972) Westlake reversed the usual sequence and wrote the movie script first, then turned it into a novel...