Word: putdown
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...dictionary-format text (supplemented by a Portnoyesque glossary of slang) similarly blends frankness with a pervading concern for mutual tenderness and respect in expressions of sexuality. The definition of brothel, for instance, is a deft putdown: "a house where people can rent sexual partners." Nudity describes the body not only as being "sexually attractive" but also as "vulnerable and in need of protection." Chastity, far from connoting abstinence, involves "respect for the sexual partner as an individual, not as a sexual object to be used at convenience." There is also compassionate treatment of the difficult subject of homosexuality...
Prelaunch Putdown. Beyond such necessities. Scorpio felt that Aquarius went for the big money because it was an unambiguous way of keeping score-of measuring himself against the competition. There was the possibility that his market value would never be higher. The past two years had brought him to a pinnacle of praise and publicity. He was one of the best. But the fact was that he had never made Jacqueline Susann or Erich Segal-style profits for his publishers...
...couldn't do the same for them. Although not the ranking NASA official present, he stole the show. Aquarius respected him for it, even though he described him as looking like "the head waiter of the largest hofbrau house in Heaven." Aquarius was famous for that kind of putdown, although he himself offered the observer a variety of choices. In his steel-rim glasses and vested pinstripe suit, he was not unlike a Mafia accountant. Casually attired at his Brooklyn Heights brownstone amid the boarding nets, ropes and trapezes that decorated the living room, he could resemble a high...
...second play on this double bill, Jakey Fat Boy, is a hilarious putdown of the hopped-up cult of being "with it." Much of the humor revolves around malicious In jokes about Kenneth Tynan, deviser of Oh! Calcutta! Jake, the hero (O'Connor), is obsessed by Tynan, referring to him as being "uptight with now," or else identifying with him: "I am up there with Ken Tynan and all the great lovers, all the major erotic figures." What Jake actually is, of course, is autoerotic, an onanistic intellectual voyeur...
...caring whether the cut is shallow or deep, but seeking only to wound. The dialogue comes equipped with quills. "You said something last night about having another baby," he says. "What's your position on that now?" Her reply is a don't-give-a-damn putdown: "Oh, I suppose just lying on my back." What gives this exchange its edge and makes the situation simultaneously forceful and intolerable, is the unmistakable air of reality...