Word: punning
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Thus the artist "Fiddleman" (Malamud's pun) is officially pronounced dead. But out of his almost interminable death agonies, Fidelman (a faithful human being) has been born...
...oceans of turgid or fawning prose, while the subject drowns. In The Marx Brothers at the Movies the text is as good as the pictures. The still ones, that is; nothing can quite match the films. Zimmerman shows just how much Groucho could inscribe on the head of a pun: "This is indeed a gala day. That's plenty. I don't think I could handle more than a gal a day." He retells the best of the anecdotes from the days when the boys were as funny off-screen as on. Best of all, the book resists...
Among "non-revolutionary" songs there are--to make further categorical (timidly, pun intended) distinctions--"good" songs, "bad" songs, and "arresting" songs. Once, the Beatles had a near-monopoly on good and arresting songs--this is no longer true. Leaving aside such heavyweights as the Rolling Stones and the Who, even lesser luminaries like Donovan, the Kinks, and Traffic have produced their share of Beatle-quality rock-and-roll. This being so, one is proportionately less impressed with the Beatles as the quantity of their quality work declines. When, out of 30 songs that are clearly not setting new standards...
...dispose of the problem? Clearly not. Cleverly, wisely, Davidson offers no final solution. Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that has lost its virtue; paying old debts; returning to success after losses in life or love...
...Literally, "self-publishing," a pun on Gosizdat, the acronym for State Publishing House. ? TIME's quotations are taken from the Collins edition. * The counterintelligence organization popularized by Ian Fleming. Its name is an acronym from the Russian words for "death to spies." The man who denounced Solzhenitsyn was Alexei Romanov, now chairman of the State Cinematography Committee...