Word: prig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hates the web of social hypocrisy in which men and women entangle themselves. He hates everything that in Eliot's words is "as false as a smile and the shake of a hand." His insistence on absolute candor is blind, humorless and therefore funny. He is a moral prig who thinks of himself as the only honest man alive, and he wants the world to recognize it. He tells the truth till it hurts-others. Still, he raises an important question of principle. When does hypocrisy breed corruption...
...public--innocent or otherwise--would be interested in the school life of one 18-year-old prig in the middle fifties passes my comprehension. Prescott claims that his journal is a documentary of a life style of his time, and thereby assumes a social importance beyond that which it possessed intrinsically, but it isn't and it doesn't. Prescott's alcoholic prep-school degeneracy did not, as he himself admits, characterize all Harvard any more then than it does now. His freshman year was a private thing that he went through--and it is a private thing that...
...here is no command perform ance by author's fiat. The Black Prince is that rarest of novels, one which conveys the texture, the immediacy, the superb improbability of love as it hap pens. The metamorphosis of Bradley from a self-concerned prig into a dancer of the rites of spring does such full justice to the mysteries of the heart, imagination and the groin, as to seem predestined...
...lieu of characterization, Scenarist Stone (Charade, Father Goose) furnishes each prominent member of the congress with a quirk or a foible by which he will be easily recognizable, if not quite human. Thus John Adams (William Daniels) is a prig, Jefferson (Ken Howard) a love-smitten daydreamer, Franklin (Howard Da Silva) a convivial pragmatist, and so on. The actors seize on these poor scraps and work them to death, although they should probably be commended for not breaking into giggles over such Stone dialogue as "Better get yourself down to Congress, Mr. Adams" or "Reconciliation my ass-the people want...
...beginning Comrade V. is a case of the scientist as monstrous prig. When he played goalie on his school soccer team, young V. effortlessly blocked shots as exercises in trigonometry. At his father's funeral he coolly analyzed the seating patterns of mourners as a bimodal distribution. After he married, he computed the time his wife and children were subtracting from his fruitful professional computing-and promptly abandoned them...