Word: patriarchal
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Died. Sir Compton Mackenzie, 89, prolific, puckish patriarch of British letters; in Edinburgh. Though successful movies (Sylvia Scarlett, Tight Little Island) were adapted from Mackenzie works, the novel Sinister Street, banned as too risqué when it first appeared in 1913, remained the most popular of his more than 100 books. He wrote controversial nonfiction as well: Greek Memories (1932) earned him a ?100 fine for revealing official documents from his tenure as a World War I intelligence agent, and The Windsor Tapestry (1938) created a sensation with its passionate defense of Edward VIII's abdication. Mackenzie held...
...Metcalf). They engage in a sacrificial stomping dance entangled in electric cords and thrust microphones. It is part musical cutting session, part machine-gun duel of far-out words, and it is as chillingly old as a tribal rite in which the young warrior snatches control from the aging patriarch. The language varies between wild incomprehensibility and allusive symbolism. Crow, for instance, calls Hoss, "Feathers," meaning horse feathers, but also meaning that Hoss is chicken. Everyone should be provided with a text before they enter the playhouse. If the words are often unclear, their intent is not. This is language...
...treasured stories of biblical cunning. In Genesis, the patriarch Jacob outsmarts his parsimonious uncle Laban while tending Laban's flocks. First he tells Laban to cull all spotted sheep and goats out of the flock for safekeeping, then offers to tend the "monochrome" remainder (white sheep, black goats), taking only spotted offspring as his pay. Laban quickly agrees. Jacob sets about having the animals couple in front of peeled branches. They produce large numbers of spotted offspring, and Jacob becomes rich...
...sheer unattractiveness, nothing quite matched Tiriac's attack on James Van Alen, a patriarch of American tennis. Objecting to what he thought was razzing, Tiriac stalked over to the stands, threatened to emasculate Van Alen and called his startled wife a bitch. When Smith shook hands with Tiriac after their match, he told the Rumanian: "I've lost a lot of respect for you in the last three days." Said Ralston, summing up the U.S. reaction to the tawdry affair: "I still can't believe...
Andreski does not linger long in generalities; he documents his charges and spares few of the luminaries of social science in the process. For instance, he finds the patriarch of modern sociology, Talcott Parsons, guilty of "monumental muddleheadedness" and of making "the simplest truth appear unfathomably obscure." What particularly riles Andreski about Parsons is his "voluntaristic theory of action," which in essence states that to understand behavior it is necessary to take into account men's wishes, beliefs, resources and decisions. This idea, writes Andreski, represents "an important step in the mental development of mankind, but it must have...