Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...grim when you can perform improv for audiences in Palm Beach, prance around on stage like a gorilla or translate the phrase "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me" into foreign languages? (Don't ask. See their Web site...
...demagoguery. The question is both wrong and arrogant--Russia was never ours to lose--and the real issue is what to do now. But it's already a pundit's dream topic, since it's more fun to lay blame than confront facts and complexity. The "Who lost" phrase is custom cut for G.O.P. presidential contenders to score points against Democratic candidate Al Gore, tagging him as the front man in the Clinton Administration's "failed policy." Capitol Hill is aboil with hearings, beginning this week, aimed at flogging the Administration for everything that's gone wrong in Russia...
What makes him a special piece of work, though, is that he openly boasts that he deliberately engineered the production of his two daughters to make the family rich. Giving new zest to the phrase refreshing candor, he told the Today show's Matt Lauer last Friday that the original idea for the manufacture of Venus and Serena came to him when he happened to see a woman win "$30 or $40 thousand" in a tennis tournament, "and she played four days!" Not Thomas Edison, not Alexander Graham Bell, not Bill Gates could have been more enthusiastically inspired...
...very suave but very ignorant self-satisfaction," Purdy says of the Exeter atmosphere. "There was this sense of casual entitlement." Later he was admitted to Harvard, where he became, in his own dramatic phrase, "obsessed with ethics." Listening to Purdy describe his zeal for Kant and Hegel, it's easy to see why certain critics can't help poking fun at him. Why so serious? And considering the status of Purdy's heroes--from the great French essayist Montaigne to the brave Polish dissident Adam Michnik--the objects of his derision seem like straw men. Purdy singles out for special...
...makes the transitions between these and a dozen other emotions heedlessly, without warning or visible preparation. You never know where he's coming from, or where he's going to end up in a scene. Yet boldly challenging our sympathies, he somehow wins them because, to borrow a phrase, he's a man in full...