Word: potter
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SOME NOTES ON LIFEMANSHIP (120 pp.) -Stephen Potter-Holt...
...most significant contribution to civilization, more important even than plum pudding, plaid dinner jackets and Winston Churchill, is the principle of the survival of the fittest. Adam Smith applied it to economics, Charles Darwin to biology and Cecil Rhodes to Empire. In these illustrious footsteps follows Stephen Potter, who threatens to apply it to everything...
Americans, in their open-faced optimism, are apt to believe that the basic assets for social success are good will, a pretty wife, and perhaps a few funny stories. Potter, product of an older and more cynical order, is convinced that all social intercourse is in fact a merciless jungle struggle, where the weaker will be gobbled up like an anchovy canape by the man with the firmer grip on the conversation and the Martini glass. In his scholarly The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating (TIME, Sept. 6, 1948), Evolutionist Potter...
...mater of fact, as one might suspect from the fact that the sequel is as good as the original, the secret of Potter's charm does not lie in the humorous gimmick he uses (Definition Humor is an old and overworked technique) But in his deft touch: shrewd use of examples, characters, and dialogue, and delicately pitched understatement (along with plenty of overstatement). And there is also that pleasant touch of satire, which marked the earlier book...
There is plenty of simple labeling ("Lowbrowmanship," "Woomanship," "Daily Mirrorship") but we get the real Potter charm in such characters as Hope-Tipping of Buttermere who "first made a name for himself in 1930 by saying that 'the one thing that was lacking, of course, from D. H. Lawrence's novels, was the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life.'" Hope-tipping may be a formula man, and the humor which made him may be limited, but he has the resi spark of original humor. So does "Lifemanship...