Word: putdowns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Public Purpose, published in 1973, which argued for a "new socialism"-Galbraith has seemed tediously preachy. In Money he has recovered the gently acerbic touch that he displayed as a reformist capitalist, and that made popular such books as The Affluent Society and the New Industrial State. Sample putdown: "Those who talk of money and teach about it and make their living by it gain prestige, esteem and pecuniary return, as does a doctor or a witch doctor, from cultivating the belief that they are in privileged association with the occult ... Though professionally rewarding and personally, profitable, this...
...kill for applause"). He is pleased to encounter again on his native turf that "unsullied sister of Smog," good old English Fog. In a miniautobiography he offers thanks to helpful friends and models (among them: Hardy, Dylan Thomas, Frost, Yeats, Brecht, Kierkegaard, Goethe and Horace). Plato, however, rates a putdown ("I can't imagine anything/ that I would less like to be/ than a disincarnate Spirit"). So do the "nimble technicians" of Detroit ("Dark was the day when Diesel/ conceived his grim engine"), partly because they cannot be bothered to build "what sanity knows we need,/ an odorless...
...Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, even more than the emigration amendment tacked onto the trade bill by Washington Democrat Henry Jackson, that finally prompted the Russians to scuttle the trade agreement. Kissinger, who opposed the credit ceiling, dismissed the sum as "peanuts." For the prideful Kremlin, it was an intolerable putdown...
Finally, I just can't say enough for the zany jokester from the Purple and White band who, while the Harvard band was playing, suddenly bolted across the field trying to distract everyone. What a putdown that...
...Best putdown of non-books: The Nothing Book (Harmony/Crown; $3), with 192 blank pages...