Word: shrewd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...relies on visual verification. If you can't see Mr. Jones's skivvies, they can't impress you. And if he whispered to you across the picket fence separating your lawns that he had draped on his chunky haunches a pair of underwear tattooed with the initials of some shrewd Frenchman, you would almost certainly be reduced to uncontrollable laughter. You would never go to neighborhood barbecues, and you would keep your children in after dark...
...fact, while both papers yearn to be taken seriously as tough, independent journalistic enterprises (and both have shown grit and knowledge in covering events like the ouster in July of embattled United Artists Chairman David Begelman), Daily Variety, founded in 1933, can more justly claim a tradition of shrewd analysis and lively if eccentric writing. Indeed, the paper and its weekly sister publication originated the technique, now widely imitated by general-interest dailies, of scrutinizing the box-office record of a film in its all-important opening days in order to forecast its ultimate success. But the price of that...
...Begin's shrewd tactic, with both Jimmy Carter and Reagan, to speak admiringly of Presidents in public, while ignoring their counsels and doing whatever he wants to do. Since this ploy had worked many times before, Begin, in an interview with David K. Shipler of the New York Times, acknowledged some "differences" and "misunderstandings" with the U.S. over Lebanon, but described Regan as "a wonderful friend of the state of Isreal." Five days later, Reagan surprised angered Begin by setting forward an American plan for the Middle East that for the first time openly challenged Begin's course...
Spindly, pallid, shrewd, vulnerable and yet rather grand, he appears at his sweetly domineering best in My Favorite Year (1954, by the way). The role is that of an Errol Flynn-like movie star named Alan Swann whose swash has buckled to the point where the IRS is forcing him to choose between deportation and a back-tax-paying appearance on a TV comedy program. This show bears a more than coincidental resemblance to Sid Caesar's old Your Show of Shows. The perils it presents to a man whose joints have been vulcanized by excesses of meaningful booze...
...insularity, but his efforts at horizon-expansion culminate in a mealy-mouthed dpiphany in a drugstore, where a kind counter woman revives him after he faints, moving him to conclude, "There are some people in this world who don't need courses in Social Relations to enable a firm, shrewd grasp of various social and psychological particulars...