Word: penchant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Botched Story. Whole columns were deservedly devoted to such coups. But "The Lyons Den" more typically had the flair of a railway timetable. Lyons' prose strained toward the average, and his penchant for missing, mangling or omitting entirely the kicker of anecdotes was the despair of his sources. During the World War II point system of rationing managed by the Office of Price Administration, George S. Kaufman said that Lyons "missed so many points that he was under investigation by the OPA." One botched Lyons story: after Noel Coward had made some disparaging remarks about Brooklyn and earned...
...lack of rhythm also detracts from and sometimes interferes with an objective reading of the book. Her lines don't flow smoothly and lump together like coagulated oatmeal. "Five seagulls, circumflex accents, drift by." She displays a penchant for using formalistic inversions which add nothing but stiffness to the line: "that five-petaled sun/folds all its fruited segments out..." Spivack tends to generalize about the whole human race, instead of speaking from her own personal experience and leaving it at that...
...heard many of the tapes have said that they were appalled by the degrading conversation-talk that they did not expect to hear at a presidential level. "I wish I had not heard it," sighed one listener. Part of the offensiveness lies in Nixon's well-known private penchant for locker room language. What is less well known and more bothersome are the bitter and sometimes savage epithets he aims at individuals who have in some way angered or crossed him, and these highly personal comments include flecks of antiSemitism...
...like the back of his hand. He seems equally at home conversing with Nabokov and Asimov, I.F. Stone and I.B. Singer, Georges Simenon and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Perhaps he is most comfortable with writers like S.J. Perelman (the subject of three separate interviews) and Brigid Brophy, who share his penchant for groan-inducing puns and shameless plays on words. Parelman, Shenker tells us, has a myna bird, "scion of an ancient mynasty,...and wherever Perelman goes the bird is sure to go; it followed him to shul one day." (The bird, incidentally, is christened "Nixon's Vulture...
Chance Pairing. Depression hardship and anemic science grades ended Huntley's early hopes of becoming a doctor, but a rich baritone voice and a penchant for oratory led him to his lifetime work...