Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Born in New York City and schooled in France and Britain, Walters spent 35 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a lieutenant general in 1976. But he is remembered from those days less as a soldier than as a skilled specialist in what he calls "silent missions," a phrase he used as the title of his 1978 autobiography. Kissinger remembers Walters as a consummate translator and "a great actor able to render not only the words but the intonation and attitude of the speaker." If there was anything Walters enjoyed more than "imitating the men for whom...
...aftermath, Yasser Arafat said the U.S. was guilty of "cowboy logic." It seemed to Americans an oddly flat and barbless phrase, something like the boiler-plate invective ("capitalist roaders," "unreliable elements") for which Communist regimes have a dreary genius. Terrorism is a haunted house, theater in the shadows. It needs its ugly special effects. Terror depends, so to speak, upon absolute artistic control. But suddenly in the Achille Lauro case, the house lights came up, and Arafat found himself blinking uncomfortably at the audience. No wonder his rhetoric sounded lame...
...Ransom, a private investigator, he is direct, foul-mouthed, and undeniably charming. Just as Jagged Edge threatens to take itself too seriously, Loggia breezes in with Sam's own perverse and sanely brusque opinion of the murderer and his crime: "Fuck him," he comments, dismissing in one succinct phrase every emotionally contrived moment in the movie...
DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (Harvard Square, Sunday) is no longer just a movie title. Now we have Desperately Seeking Re-Election, Desperately Seeking Lunch. And think about why. It's not just the felicity of the phrase Desperately Seeking.... It's the statement of an age, an age of scarcity. Neither Tocqueville, nor Gibson, nor even Garry Trudeau could find a more concise image of the age than poor Susan (Madonna) drying her forest of armpit hairs under an air handdryer at Grand Central Station...
...calculated. The opening cut, the bleach-brained "Freeway of Love," explores adolescent sexuality with all the subtlety of a rubber hygiene implement. And it hardly requires a degree from the Motor City School of Imagery to figure out what Franklin means when she refers to her "pink Cadillac": the phrase does for Springsteen's infamous auto what Sheena's "sugar walls" did for the dextrose concession...