Word: retort
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audiences who sometimes complain that they cannot follow the rich accents of British movie stars could read a sprightly retort from the other side last week. Wrote the London Spectator's Film Critic Virginia Graham, in a bittersweet review of Born Yesterday: The stars' performances "leave nothing to be desired-that, at least, is the impression left by this film, an impression which it is extraordinarily clever of it to make seeing that, as it is written in Bronx, only one out of every ten words is comprehensible. I remember once being similarly impressed by a film...
Often, Southerners, wary of offending a dark-skinned man who might turn out to be a United Nations diplomat, would ask: "Are you colored?" Angrily, Rowan would retort: "Can't you see I'm colored? What you mean is, am I an American? Yes, I am an American." Thus assured, they would make him keep to the color line...
...Daily News made its own unjournalistic retort four days later. For a story headlined Ex-Ace JAILED ON A CHARGE OF BANK ROBBERY, the News dug up an old picture of Reagan talking to one Byron Kennedy, an ex-Air Force officer who had been arrested on a charge of robbing an East Los Angeles bank. (Reagan had posed with Kennerly nine years before, when the airman was technical adviser on one of Reagan's pictures...
...representative on the U.N. Security Council, lost patience with Russia's Jacob Malik. The Russian representative, snapped Dr. Tsiang one day last week, "spends much of his superabundant energy in trying to prove to us that black is white and that white is black." Malik's retort made spectators grin: Tsiang's reference to black & white was "an insult to 14 million Negroes in the U.S." He added heavily: "White men, too, may have a black conscience and a black soul...
...were the same lie-studded ones he had delivered before. Three times he spoke lengthily, then when he sought the floor for a fourth time, Jebb snapped: "I suppose you could go on making your arguments forever." Malik said he needed only "one sentence" this time. Jebb's retort was rapier-quick: "I would be delighted to hear a speech of one sentence from the Soviet Union representative." The audience laughed and cheered. Malik flushed. Jebb let the noise linger 45 seconds before he gaveled for silence...