Word: prig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
John Glenn, for example: Wolfe sketches him as a bit of a prig, a jogging, strait-laced Presbyterian driving an underpowered Peugeot, who scolded his colleagues for their after-hours whoopee. The current Senator from Ohio, Wolfe suggests, may have gone to NASA officials in an effort to replace Shepard on the first flight. Others, too, according to Wolfe, would act in ways that demonstrated that "feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind." Gus Grissom almost certainly blew the hatch too soon, flooding and sinking his capsule, and then stubbornly maintained that the machine "malfunctioned." Scott Carpenter...
Brutus is the moral core of the play, a bit of a standoffish prig, perhaps, but still unstainably idealistic. In Rene Auberjonois's handling he is merely sweatily fretful, like someone who has just received word that he is up for an IRS audit. When it comes to the lean and hungry Cassius, Richard Dreyfuss looks like someone who makes substantial midnight raids on the fridge. More pertinently, he appears as the soul of sanity, a jarringly implausible refutation of the qualities of envy, thwarted ambition and deviousness that are an intrinsic part of Cassius' makeup...
Emmylou is the daughter of a career Marine family. She grew up in Virginia, worked hard at school and was considered a "real prig." Says she: "High schools are real hip now, but there was no counterculture in Woodbridge, Va. in 1963. You were either a homecoming queen or a real weirdo. I was a 16-year-old Wasp wanting to quit school and become Woody Guthrie." She entered the University of North Carolina in 1965 on a dramatic scholarship. "It was a time when the golden girls got married to med students," she recalls. More fearful of regimentation than...
...pretending his guest is someone he al ready knows, a fellow whose wife he once proudly seduced. Gielgud humors him with a sly expression of disbelief; his viola voice emerges to play, tease, and finally wound in a fumbled attempt at old-boy friendship. Richardson, ever the literary prig, rejects him: "Let us change the subject. For the last time." He commits his soul to his servants, two North London roughnecks with a sheen of airline-steward manners, and slides willingly into no man's land, "which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever...
...Tamara Mitchel as Princess Ida has a voice that is too overly operatic for the part, and her idea of expressing anguish, dismay, or annoyance is to look as though she has just tasted something ghastly. She succeeds in making a heroine who is, as written, something of a prig, absolutely insufferable...