Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pair talked and then walked together back over to the Cambridge side of the river to the park, where Kang claims Foppiano attacked him. Homans said Kang said he never cut Foppiano, and the attorney speculated that perhaps her injuries were self-inflicted...
GROWING PAINS. Are any of these candidates ready to lead the nation? Not if one listens to the nightly stream of wisecracks from Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman -- and the candidates themselves. Tongue-in-cheek self- deprecation has become a favorite rhetorical tactic. Dukakis initiated it at a Democratic luncheon before his acceptance speech in Atlanta, joking that his wife had fallen asleep while reading the text. Bush's own acceptance speech was peppered with such put-downs as "I'll try to be fair to the other side; I'll try to hold my charisma in check...
Dukakis' TV reviews have jumped around in approximate relationship to the polls. Early on he was derided as an untelegenic bore. After Atlanta, his TVQ soared. Now a backlash is setting in ("His tone is at once annoyed and complacent, that of a self-satisfied scold" -- George Will). In truth, Dukakis may be close to the ideal TV candidate: physically ungainly and ill- proportioned when seen from a distance but a compelling presence in close- up. His speaking style is a good blend of the conversational and the resonant, and he makes the canniest use of pauses since Jack Benny...
...have an inordinate amount of faith in my own ability to do things," Thompson says crisply, though his voice and manner have softened since 1984. He is known for a charming braggadocio that runs to self-aggrandizing T shirts. And if asked how he is, he will probably still reply, "A little short of fantastic." But marriage last year to his childhood sweetheart settled Thompson noticeably, and the birth of a daughter twelve weeks prematurely jumbled his regimen. "My little girl weighed less than a bag of sugar. It was incredible how tiny she was. Yet she was perfectly formed...
...tips her hand, perhaps too early in the book, in the direction of heterosexual detente. The ex-husband, now remarried, is sketched as a decent fellow. Polly's closest friend, a cozy, catlike lesbian named Jeanne, shows herself, in the book's best characterization, to be malicious and totally self-absorbed. Most important, Polly's research, which she and her friends assume will prove that Painter Jones was abused and underrated by the men in her life, goes awkwardly sour. It turns out that Jones was indeed a genius but that she was far harder on men than they were...