Word: penchants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Instead she emerges as a vital and extraordinarily real human being. As she tells her own story, her unique perceptivity gives the admittedly limited world of her contacts a special freshness. Josephine has a penchant for questioning the connections ordinarily drawn between different aspects of everyday experience. An invitation bearing her name inspires the following reflection: "It was the hit-or-miss of these words that struck me most. I knew the collocution was supposed to represent me and no one else, but it always seemed odd that so loose an approximation as a name could have a claim...
...have been active in and an observer of Ivy athletics for some thirty years. I think I know a little of what I am talking about. I seriously question whether Mr. Lottman has anything more behind his views than a penchant for destructive cynicism plus a habit of self-indulgence in this direction, minus a sense of responsibility in making use of our much heralded freedom of the press To back this...
Director Nicholas Ray makes few positive contributions. With his customary penchant for the pretentious (Johnny Guitar), he slushes up the sound track with angel voices-all, as usual, soprano, apparently on the theory that only girls are nice enough to be angels: he fancy-pants around with his camera in a ludicrous gilt-plaster palace that looks as if it were made of baroque-candy; and he ever-so-reverently overdresses his hovel scenes till they gloom and glow like cheap reproductions of Murillo...
...heart attack; in Hollywood. In such Marx Brothers hits as Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera and A Night in Casablanca, Chico convulsed fans with his deadpan translation of horn honks made by leering Brother Harpo, his wild-eyed pocket picking and shortchanging and his Chaplinesque penchant for attracting trouble...
...humorist actually most closely akin to Jean Kerr, at her best, is Robert Benchley. As writers, they share the same gently shrugging quality that utterly preludes malice, the same preoccupation with the bizarre edges of the commonplace, the same disarming penchant for self-deprecation, as when the ample Mrs. Kerr compares herself to "a large bran muffin" or Benchley calls himself "Sweet Old Bob, or sometimes just the initials...