Word: prim
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...narrative along in a straight line largely unadorned by the surprises and ambiguities that enrich his other plots. Boy meets boy, boy loses boy, second boy meets girl and takes up "normal" life, first boy meets another boy and affirms homosexual values in the face of hostile society. A prim sense of authorial constraint weighs on every page. The irony is that when Forster wrote obliquely about disguised homosexual relationships, as in The Longest Journey, he seemed far less inhibited and made the air crackle far more with implications...
Muskie's style is inconsistent. He can be very prim, exuding down-East caution and a lawyer's precision as he quibbles over the exact meaning of something that he has said earlier. On more relaxed occasions, he can be candid to the point of naivete and sloppy in his expression. That variation in the manner of Muskie's answers baffles even his friends; the seeming contradictions in the substance of what he says have made him vulnerable to attack. Pros within his own party believe that Muskie should make his positions plainer...
Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
That's the way it is with Four on a Garden. All comedy is human comedy. One must be able to sympathize, recognize or identify with the person or the situation behind the gag. That was true in Cactus Flower, where one wanted the prim moth of a nurse to be transformed into a seductive butterfly. It was also true in Forty Carats, where one somehow cared whether or not the 40-year-old matron became the bride of her ardent 22-year-old lover...
...increases was the first time that anyone representing the elderly spoke out on rent control. Catherine Handley of the Committee for the elderly approached the microphone after most everyone else had spoken. A young tenant jumped up to adjust the microphone for the short grey-haired lady in a prim blue pillbox hat. She didn't really say anything different from any of the other tenants and she wasn't backed up by the rest of the Committee for the Elderly chanting or carrying signs but she was perhaps the only speaker who had sympathy from the entire audience when...