Word: rosten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten records a joke about the Lipshitz Curse: a blond at a charity ball is wearing an enormous diamond. She boasts that there are three great diamonds in the world-the Hope, the Kohinoor and her own, the Lipshitz. But, unfortunately, she tells her friends, with the Lipshitz diamond comes the Lipshitz Curse. "The Lipshitz Curse? What is the Lipshitz Curse?" The blond sighs: "Lipshitz...
...Rosten casts Lipshitz as a husband. Steinbrenner is more like an archetypal father. When he is up for the role, he is a perfect family tyrant: overbearing, insufferable, unembarrassable, the kind of man who makes scenes in public and mortifies his children. The Pittsburgh Pirates used to describe themselves as "family." That was sentimentality. The Yankees are more like a grimly real family: sullen and bruised by grievances and quarrelsome and full of parricidal silences. Presiding over the drama is the militaristic alldaddy, Steinbrenner as the Great Santini. He thunders, and acquires a certain force of nature...
Passions and Prejudices, Leo Rosten...
...Rosten provides, as usual, superior night-table reading for those who like to fall asleep laughing, or even to stay awake thinking. One of his best efforts is a warning to travelers who contemplate using phrase-book French. He reports that when he tried to communicate with a ticket agent in Paris, the following discourse took place...
...essays are comic turns; Rosten does equally well at carrying weighty subjects lightly. His ideas are unstartling, and in fact they would seem ordinary, if clarity and common sense were ordinary. "I wonder how those faculty members who aided campus revolt will come to terms with themselves in a calmer future," he muses, writing about student takeovers of universities in the '60s. "Did they not give away rights they would have refused to surrender to, say, an investigating committee of Congress, or a reactionary board of trustees, or a witch-hunting press? Did they...