Word: sham
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...correct San Francisco world in which his daughter lives with her mother and stepfather, and his own glamour puts the girl's serious young ranchman fiancé in the shade, the wedding bells begin to grow faint. For father's ideal of enjoying every real or sham pleasure goes to daughter's head like champagne. Simultaneously, the blood rushes to the ranchman's, and he denounces father's wastrel charms in ringing tones. After that, the play gets a bit shaky-and talky-what with having to cast its vote for either irreproachable dullness...
Once More, With Feeling (by Harry Kurnitz) is a farcical assault on the world of music, not unlike the author's skirmish, in Reclining Figure, with the world of art. The method is to let fly now at chicanery and now at sham, and in between to go in for shenanigans. The central figure is an egomaniac orchestra conductor who, from shattering his musicians' fiddles and his trustees' feelings, can hardly find an orchestra to conduct. On one side he is Blanked by a shameless manager who ten times a day tries to save the day with...
...trousers, which he had taken off during the conversation and said, 'Here, my darling, you wear them.' And he walked out of her life." It would be wonderful, said Hecht, if Charlie's attitude "was the attitude of the young world toward its fatheaded, sham-filled adults...
...most telling--bits and snatches of Shakespeare. Richard II abdicates, and before his robes are fairly off, Hamlet is making plans. Romeo dies with a kiss on his lips, steps modestly back amid applause, and reads a sonnet. To juxtapose great speeches is to pretend that their greatness is sham, and give weight to the Puritan notion that the theatre is only a dirty trick...
...Republic last February, Egyptian and Syrian leaders acted as if the union of their two countries, which do not even share a common border, were the most natural thing in the world. The U.A.R.'s propagandists denounced the rival Hashemite Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan* as a "sham" that would soon collapse, while theirs was a merger of peoples bound by history, blood and religion. Impulsive Syrians, who voted almost unanimously for Gamal Abdel Nasser as the first President of the new republic, thought of him as an Arab and only incidentally as an Egyptian. But after five...