Word: preens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Automakers are gambling that the sports-car bug will spread. After a long drought, more than a dozen such vehicles, from midpriced roadsters like the Audi TT ($33,000) to luxury rockers such as Porsche's 911 GT2 ($182,000), now preen and pose in showrooms. Since 1995, sports-car sales have risen more than 50%, to about 100,000 this year, and are forecast to grow an additional 60% by 2007. While the overall market for two-seaters is limp right now--it's the kind of purchase that people postpone in an uncertain economy--automakers have their reasons...
Although members of the English faculty preen themselves in the Boston Globe for “standing strongly by the First Amendment,” their posture of defiance camouflages what is mere conformity with the prevailing norms of political correctness. The faculty would never have invited anyone who defames blacks, hispanics, women or homosexuals—the minorities currently under liberal protection. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is quite the trend. The dramatization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is currently primetime fare for much of the Arab and Muslim world, to the notable silence...
...trick in a movie aiming at romantic refinement is to avoid being either pushy or inert. There Possession fails, certainly in the modern half of the story. Actors preen overmuch; Paltrow again imitates Englishness by sucking in her suave cheeks; Eckhart (a LaBute regular) works too hard at being the outspoken American abroad. Gabriel Yared's music is forced to do the actors' emoting for them--a sure sign the director doesn't trust the story to carry the feeling...
...wildly productive that in September he will publish Cape May Court House, about a car crash that may have been a cover for murder. Posterity will have the final say, and we can assure you which way it will go, but for now it's Schiller who can preen...
...introduces the professor’s CD, Sketches of My Culture, with the announcement that “in all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.” A lesser man, having produced such a watershed work, might have been tempted to caper and preen, to indulge in self-congratulation. But Cornel West, modest genius that he is, does everything with “ego-deflating humility...