Word: prig
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Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger), author of the best-selling semifeminist screed Down with Love, is on a collision course with rakish journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor). She thinks he's a pig; he thinks she's a prig. Abetted by their respective editors, Vikki Hiller (Sarah Paulson) and Peter MacMannus (David Hyde Pierce), they parry, gavotte and dissemble: Catcher pretends to be a rube astronaut; Barbara pretends to be...well, we can't give away the plot...
Which doesn't mean Delbanco is a prig. When he venerates Puritans, it's not because they were moralists but because, as his research suggests, they were more searching than self-assured, believing "that the self without God is helpless" and yet finding themselves in this confusing, isolating new land. For Delbanco, the most important thing we have lost in our age of detached sardonicism isn't morality but moral curiosity, the search for the meanings of good and evil in our confusing times...
Anyone who says otherwise, such students might claim, is a moral prig. Somehow the rights emanating from the fact that human beings occasionally engage in sexual intercourse have trumped the rights emanating the fact that human beings possess minds and consciences. This is not compatible with the spirit of the Constitution, and it is surely not consonant with the purpose of this University...
...knowing, irony-drenched world of baby-boomer culture, no one wants to be thought a prig. So let's stipulate that simple adultery would not have endangered the President politically or created the lurid spectacle before us. He's been accused of that before and survived. People seemed not to believe his denials in 1992 about Gennifer Flowers--in fact, according to leaks from his recent deposition, the President seems not to have believed them himself--but the public apparently forgave him. An implicit bargain was struck, and it's hard to imagine a national convulsion erupting from disclosures that...
Fred: I wasn't using prig pejoratively...