Word: phrasing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ideas are often largely nonsensical. But they are never completely so. You may be reading through the wildest moments of a polemic against democracy, wondering if he is ever going to stop jabbering, when suddenly he does just that. Suddenly a paragraph intrudes, or a sentence, or an epigrammatic phrase, and makes you stop and think, and sticks with you and bounces about in your head for several hours, or even days. At his worst, in his most inaccurate, uninformed, out-dated, and even puerile moments, he manages to come up with something more worth saying than the collected works...
...Frank's novel by Jack Kirkland; produced by Mr. Kirkland) was the season's final play and worst experience. It concerned the one man in the world who had not been left sterile by an atomic explosion. Plugging doggedly away, Adapter Kirkland (Tobacco Road) left no phrase unturned that might possibly call forth a snicker. But Mr. Adam was worse than vulgar; it was almost maddeningly boring. By week's end it had followed the season to the grave...
...indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger." Freedom of speech, they said, could not be denied unless it created, in the late Oliver Wendell Holmes's classic phrase, "a clear and present danger" to public safety and welfare...
...four-a-day show a pale shadow of the classic two-a-day that died at the Palace in 1932. It was true that to get a new start, the proud old Palace had humbled itself with low-budget acts and no headliners. In a famed Variety phrase, the new show's hoofers, illusionists and comics were "good for the smalltime." But Variety itself, pointing to the Palace's low admission scale (55? to 95? on weekdays), gave the ghost a good chance for survival...
Rival from Brooklyn. Even Trainer Jones performs no feeding or training miracles with second-rate horses. Quick to spot the no-goods, he loses no time unloading them. His pet phrase: "Trade'm away for a dog and then shoot...