Word: popinjay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...face of which his pragmatism is meaningless and his nihilism a cheerless thing. The agent of his undoing is the narrator of the book, Jacob Horner, one of the most fascinatingly dreadful characters to appear in a long time. He is self-described as "owl. peacock, chameleon, donkey and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary." In more modern terms, he is also a manic-depressive, and a fugitive from a psychotherapeutic institution called the Remobilization Farm...
Aching Sincerity. Actor Guinness has never been out of a job since. Three months later he was playing Osric to Gielgud's Hamlet, and the critics took special note of his "admirable popinjay." Then it was William ("a wondrous blank") in As You Like It, Sir Andrew Aguecheek ("a collector's item") in Twelfth Night, Lorenzo ("meditative, star-struck beauty that takes the breath away") in The Merchant of Venice. And at 24, he played his first Hamlet in an Old Vic production directed by Tyrone Guthrie. Most critics agreed that the Hamlet lacked force, but one wrote...
Furthermore, the fellow had angered the local Carmelites by taking over from them the hearing of confession in the town, and the Capuchins by discrediting their cloister's miracle-working image. There was, however, some consolation, for the priestly popinjay had made an enemy of Cardinal Richelieu by walking ahead of him during a religious procession. And just as rashly, he had a child by the daughter of his best friend, the public prosecutor of Loudun...
...Brown's definition: "A human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...
Niffle meant a "human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...