Word: proper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...theorist's tempting conceit, the assumption that someone is behind all the awful events in the world. The true terror is, of course, that no one is, and we live in a world of random horror. Still, the premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, it gets spoilt by Ellis' penchant for proper nouns. For a book whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem is the namedropping. Supposedly...
...contract. It seems to be Ellis' convenient shorthand for character sketches. When Victor undergoes a transformation to a law student, we know he is different because he now wears a Brooks Brothers suit and drinks Diet Coke. London and Paris become nothing more than a different collection of recognizable proper nouns (Notting Hill and Irvine Welsh in the first case; Chez Georges and Yves Saint-Laurent in the second...
...Kristol. All year the political right awaited the moment when everyone would agree that Ken Starr's investigation was the institutional expression of a national consensus, namely that the President's relationship with Lewinsky was not simply wrong but criminal. That means it was something that it was the proper business of government to discover, interrogate, rip to pieces, expose and punish. What happened of course is that most people signaled, through polls and then on Election Day, that maybe they didn't feel that way. As the events of December made plain, how those people felt didn't matter...
When even having a proper name is too conventional, surely having a proper marriage is out of the question. But in 1996, apparently swept up in a fleeting wave of sentimentality, THE ARTIST BORN AS PRINCE married girlfriend MAYTE GARCIA in Minneapolis, Minn., on Valentine's Day. Finally coming to his senses, the artist last week rectified the oversight and announced that he is planning to annul his marriage, not because he doesn't love his wife, but because he believes "contracts are made by man to guarantee the possibility of divorce." At a Madrid press conference, the nameless...
...ideas. Which are manifold. His next novel is a "fantasy technothriller" featuring terrorists and assassins. He contributes to Wired and the Australian magazine World Art and spends loving hours maintaining busy e-mail lists on "dead media," foreign-language science-fiction and postindustrial design. And though he's a proper punk skeptic when it comes to politics--"My job is to play with nutty ideas, not grapple with serious issues"--he is truly obsessed with global warming, which this year's brutal Southwestern drought brought a bit too close to home. "Why am I living in a world where...