Word: rapscallion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Thus we must pity the chastened shock jock, for he knows not what he does. Perhaps he’s that rapscallion whose ribald humor, so popular on the jungle gym, is arbitrarily condemned by the grown-ups, while the other rascals escape unscathed. The justification for his punishment eludes him, yet he must desperately try to seem sorry...
...great American novel,” it makes little direct contact with Twain’s text. Miss Watson, the sister of the Widow Douglas, Huck’s adoptive mother and owner from whom Jim has fled, shows up sporadically, but the one direct reference to the eponymous rapscallion appears only on the 132nd of 161 pages. Jim himself seems more like a ghost of inspiration, a whiff of poetic afflatus, than a flesh-and-blood character, for all his occasional poignancy...
...days of Jim Crow racism (I have thousands of memories of that) accompanied by the bittersweet, paradoxical business of real, exuberant friendships between black children and white children: innocent intimacies, prelapsarian. Those friendships have the quality of Mark Twain boyhoods - not entirely a matter of Tom Sawyer's rapscallion innocence, but something of boyhood bitterly shadowed, as "Huckleberry Finn" was, by violence, alcoholism, hatred, vicious stupidity and the precocious knowledge of evil. Harper Lee had the atmosphere in "To Kill a Mockingbird...