Word: sillier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shores of the Potomac. On either side of it loom numberless federal buildings. Except for the Pentagon, it's all right there. Most of the buildings are the familiar second-rate parodies of the Panthcon and, as Greenough pointed out over a hundred years ago, there is nothing sillier than America trying to be Corinthian. Perhaps every President for the last hundred years, tired and frustrated at the end of his term, wanted to bequeath some mark of concrete and marble, some monument to belie his own colossal incomprehension and inability to deal with the complexity of American life...
SILLY as this imaginary news dispatch may seem, it is not much sillier than the rumor, currently sweeping U.S. college campuses, that Paul McCartney is dead. As with most rumors, no one really knows its source. It has been variously traced to a thesis by an Ohio Wesleyan University student, a satirical but deadpan story in the Oct. 14 issue of the University of Michigan Daily, and a Detroit disk jockey who spread much the same nonsense over radio station WKNR. Since the rumor spread, Beatle fans have diligently parsed the albums of their heroes for clues corroborating what they...
Among the sillier-sounding premieres will be NBC's . . . Then Came Bronson, with a peripatetic adventurer in love with his motorcycle; and ABC's The Brady Bunch, in which a widower with three sons marries a widow with three daughters. If that sounds like overpopulated plagiarism of My Three Sons, Fred MacMurray, the world's champion sitchcom widower, is getting married this season now that the boys are grown...
...lost. The names of young directors (Arthur Penn and, unfortunately, Mike Nichols) are becoming good box office. Hollywood has even begun to conceive that the old directors had something to do with their films. Action, the Screen Directors' Guild journal, aped Francois Truffaut in a recent Hitchcock interview even sillier that Truffaut...
...whelming dangers or baffling situations. The word stems from the Latin superstitio, meaning "a standing still over," and connotes amazement or dread of supernatural forces beyond one's control. Rationalists scorn superstition as a hangover of primitive man's obsolete interpretations of the world. Indeed, nothing seems sillier nowadays than rituals like knocking on wood or chanting "God bless you!" (to prevent the sneezer's soul from flying away). Even so, modern behavioral scientists respect superstition as an enduring expression of the human need to master the inexplicable. "One man's superstition is another...