Word: punsters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chest muscles). There he spies the girl of his dreams-but alas, she loves a weight lifter. Can the underpected salesman sunder this pair? Sure he can, if he will only assert his baritoned intelligence against the rival falsetto. A falsetto, of course, is-in the definition of Poet-Punster Mark Van Doren-a guy with a false set o' values...
...deeply serious one. In a profession populated largely by somnambulistic hacks, his Shavian emphasis on the relation of drama to life is rare and valuable. But his seriousness never declines into solemnity; his awareness of the social significance of the stage is leavened by wit (he is a punster as well as a pundit), and by an understanding that dramatic criticism, is not merely a department of literary criticism, but something unique: an attempt "to give a permanent form to something impermanent. That," he says, "was certainly the impulse that pushed me into dramatic criticism--the impulse...
...director of Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp. Once in 1911 he tried his hand at composition-a simple air entitled Melody in A Major. A friend liked it and sold it to a publisher for $100. Wrote Banker Dawes in his diary: "I know . . . my punster friends will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they are written...
...fractional, silence is integral." Thoreau early loathed the time-serving bondage in which he pictured most of his fellow men as trapped, leading lives of quiet desperation: "What is sacrificed to time is lost to eternity." Regarding newspaper-reading as a monstrous waste of time, Thoreau later played the punster with this epigram: "Read not the Times. Read the eternities...
While some staffers thought the pun too corny and the sentence open to literal interpretation by the fast reader, none questioned the propriety of printing it. For the punster, betrayed by his nom de plume, was none other than the Times's Publisher and Board Chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who frequently writes a quiet little letter to the editor...