Word: scabrously
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Beyond the shortfall in finances and polls, at the heart of Wilson's problems is a scabrous disunity among his chief lieutenants amounting to a civil war. It pits a former George Bush operative against a tight inner circle of long-standing Wilson loyalists and, more precisely, political manager against political strategist. On one side is Craig Fuller, a former tobacco-company executive and chief of staff to then Vice President Bush. On the other is George Gorton, a longtime Wilson political consultant who has shaped the strategy for all Wilson's campaigns with a talent for crystallizing hot issues...
...amaze, although it doesn't have the fresh manic energy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel that capitalized on the then popular literary subjects of Jewish Americans and psychoanalysis. The paganized, foul-tempered Mickey Sabbath is beyond all that. Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste. Others will have their own reasons to cry foul. Roth's old adversaries in the suburban Sanhedrin should have no beef: Mickey is not bad for the Jews; he is bad for everybody. But orthodox feminists will be driven nuts by Drenka the Insatiable, and the Japanese...
...rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here." "Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although he's lost some of the fresh manic energy of 'Portnoy's Complaint' (1969)," notes TIME's R.Z. Sheppard. "Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste, while others will have their own reasons to cry foul. But there is much humor in what makes us uneasy, and Roth extracts it, as he has done for nearly 40 years, with a technique and verbal flair unmatched by his contemporaries...
...blast the entertainment industry, he touched a chord that transcended the party politics his remarks were shrewdly crafted to serve. Though popular culture has a long and proud history of offending the squares, during the current decade it has particularly kept its sharpest edges to the front. Whatever is scabrous and saw-toothed and in-your-face is probably brought to you by the major labels and the big studios. For parents, the pervasive electronic culture can start to look like some suspect stranger who hangs around their kids too much, acting loutish, rude and drunk...
...film has its share of scabrous banter -- recombinant four-letter words galore -- but the conceit of Clerks is that foul-mouthed Jersey louts have elaborate vocabularies and pensive personalities. When Randal isn't shocking the frail with a list of porn-movie titles, he is offering such bartender wisdom to Dante as this: "That seems to be the leitmotiv of your life, ever backing down." Insults cascade into insights; obscenity snowballs into philosophy. Keeping the mind alert and the tongue sharp -- for the eloquent jerks in Clerks, that's more than a defense mechanism. It's a vocation...