Word: prurient
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Most people feel gossip's special fascination "as horror or as attraction," observes the author. "Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears about it a faint flavor of the erotic . . . Surely everyone feels -- although some suppress -- the same prurient interest in others' privacies, what goes on behind closed doors." Novelist Margaret Drabble is brought on to elevate the tone: "Much fiction operates in the spirit of inspired gossip. It speculates on little evidence, inventing elaborate and artistic explanations of little incidents and overheard remarks that often leave the evidence far behind." In that observation lies the key to this...
...should anyone care about this? Many people might assume that the press was protesting against its exclusion out of a prurient or even commercial itch, annoyed at missing some sensational headlines and pictures. That is simply not the case. The press has a serious quasi-constitutional function as a representative of the public. Obviously the White House or the Pentagon remembered the Viet Nam "livingroom war" and the revulsion it created. Obviously they admired and envied Margaret Thatcher's dealing with the press during the Falklands invasion, when the Iron Lady's government allowed only a small contingent...
...cover story on "Royalty vs. the Pursuing Press," the Queen's press secretary Michael Shea said, "We might have to move forward some policy of sanction. The line should be drawn between legitimate public interest, which all members of the royal family recognize, and prurient or highly intrusive following of private lives...
...slang: "We're on Route 20 and heading north." (Translation: up to $25 million.) Both films will be fighting for the moviegoer's attention against The Revenge of the Jedi (Part III of the Star Wars saga) and a swarm of aggressive kidflix. Will there be enough prurient adults around to push both Bond pictures into the black? It makes for quite a cliffhanger-but then, everyone knows 007/007 is invincible. -By Richard Corliss. Reported by Marcia Gauger/Udaipur and William Hackman/Villefranche-sur-Mer
...imposed its own restraints, as exemplified by such pronouncements as: "I am heartsick that there may well be those persons of the masculine gender, who, lacking an intrinsic purity of character, may, by laborious effort, and much unseemly exercise of the lower ranges of the imagination, summon forth a prurient gratification, from these hapless pages...