Word: puns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THREE MEN claimed that they would revolutionize what other activists of the era had completely ignored--the field of English painting. Their rallying cry was "death to slosh," a pun on the name of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the most prestigious art school in England, the Royal Academy. The battle against its sterile and rule-ridden art had begun, they proclaimed. The youthful and enthusiastic threesome--Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Millais, and William Hunt--soon attracted the amazed attention of staid Victorians. For the public, they merely signed their paintings and publications with the mysterious initials...
Ellen McLain's Patience the native, young loveless girl who finds true love and happiness etc., etc., is properly native and young. She steals the show more than once with her singing, her stage presence and her low musical pun in the first act Nancy Urqhart Traverse as Jane, the lovelorn lass who is by her own admission, "massive," gives a superior performance, especially in her elephantine pas de deux in the second act with Bunthorne...
...With pun and allusion Nabokov turns words themselves transparent, making meanings flicker through each other. In the light of a bit of high school physics, watch what happens to the sentence: "An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to violet through the half drawn curtains..." Several pages later, a woman standing by the same window "wore a Doppler shift over her luminous body...
...beauty of a pun is in the oy of the beholder. Take Peter DeVries. "The things my wife keeps buying at auctions are keeping us baroque," he writes. And "Last night I dreamed of a female deer chasing a male deer in the mating season. . .a doe trying to make a fast buck...
...bold banner. They wait for soldiers on street corners, flinging crisp insults: "Limey pig...soldier baastids...Up yours," and then bricks and rocks. "You can't shoot a kid, can you?" says a soldier wearing a flak jacket with the inscription CS IS A GAS, a sick pun. "But I know a couple I'd like to ship," meaning deport them...