Word: peevishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fooled by the novel's obsession with death, culture, freedom, sex and sanity. White Noise is not some peevish tabloid revision of 1984. The book never stays sour and it never makes the tiring (because irrefutable) claim that TV has become the average man's Big Brother. Instead, DeLillo writes like a stand-up comedian building variations around a central 326-page-long joke. The media, neo-angst about World War 111, and trendy consumer society constitute one large punching bag, and the deadpanned oneliners seem endless. DeLillo has the greatest sense of the macabre since Poe, although without...
Suggestions that Nancy is grabbing for power, determining policy like a modern-day Edith Wilson, make the President peevish. Says he: "A part of the false image-making has been to suggest that she is some dominant force behind the scenes." She is uncomfortable discussing the nature and extent of her influence. "I read that I make decisions and I'm the power behind the throne, and that I get people fired," she says. "I don't get people fired...
...whip his countrymen into shape. During the 1930s he watched "the pitiable stampede of the 'LeftWing Intellectuals' in our own country" and tried to head it off through ridicule. He mocked the socialist sympathies expressed in Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly: "He seems to have two peevish spirits whispering into either ear: one complaining that the bedroom in which he awakes is an ugly contrast to the splendid dining-room where he was entertained the previous evening; the other saying that the names have been made up for the firing squads; he must shoot first...
...campaign repertoire, but now the speaker was Walter Mondale. All week long the Democrat pounded away at the budget deficits ("a trap door under our economy") and at the President's denial that tax increases are inevitable. And all week long the Reagan Administration was peevish and confused as it responded. Said one White House aide of Mondale's démarche on the deficit: "He really stuck it to us. It was brilliant. We look terrible...
...Indiana Jones earned a phenomenal $94.5 million in its first 23 days, and Gremlins grossed $ 12.5 million in its first weekend. But they have incited a torrent of complaints that the PG rating given both movies fails to warn impressionable young children. The outcry has come not just from peevish movie critics but from theater owners and parents as well. Carl Hoffman, a film buyer for the Dubinsky Brothers movie chain in the Midwest, says that 50 people stalked out of a screening of Gremlins because of the violence. Milwaukee Journal Movie Critic Douglas Armstrong, who does a radio call...