Word: sharpers
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Arrowsmith employs low-key tones and rolling prose, but they only make his barbs the sharper. University administrators, he says, "have, quite literally, nothing to say," so they talk "dreary rubbish." Faculties are "caught both in the hideous jungle of academic bureaucracy and their own blind professional conservatism." Many doctoral dissertations are "patient parsing of the obvious and the irrelevant," yielding "laboriously trivial discoveries." It all adds up to "a vast educational enterprise built entirely upon a caste of learned men whose learning has no relevance to the young. It is a vision of madness accomplished...
...their surface similarities, the two men are markedly different. Kennedy is coldly pragmatic, Lindsay stubbornly principled. Where Kennedy has a sharper wit, the mayor has an easier humor. While Lindsay is taller and undeniably handsomer, Bobby has The Name. Though both wear an affluent air and came into family money-an immense advantage for a man with political ambitions-neither is hurt by the aura of wealth. Indeed, it is a peculiarity of American political reporting that only self-made men are generally labeled "rich." (Actually, Lindsay's total $140,000 inheritance is exceeded by the annual return alone...
...sharper than a barber's shears! As proprietor of three fancy salons in London, Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, 38, has coiffed some of the world's most elegant women, and for the past 16 months he's been practicing his art in a Manhattan shop as well. Trouble is, New York State requires a license for that sort of thing, and it wants him to take its hairdresser exam. "Asinine and obsolete," said Sassoon. "The test requires that I do finger waving and reverse pin curling-things that haven't been used since Gloria Swanson...
...Maury Dullea, who kicked three extra points, looks sharper than last season already. Punter Jim Gahan punted for a 32-yard average, but it will take more than two punts and a windy day to test his colors...
...controversy will rage until educators produce reliable studies of the long-range effects of parental preschool teaching. No one knows whether a grasp of algebra at five makes a boy a sharper mathematician at 25. Meanwhile, all the experts urge caution-and even Doman and the Engelmanns concede that impatient parents, who tense up when Timmy says "saw" as he looks at the word was, ought to forget the whole thing...