Word: sodden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American Inquisition is written with all the attention to style and accuracy of a political flyer. The prose is so sodden with self-righteousness and heavy irony that only the faithful (i.e., "heretics") might hope to find it tolerable. And Belfrage has also retained that annoying CP habit of stating a half-truth as gospel and then scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statute of limitation for espionage protected most...
...Ryan, whose portrayal of Larry Slade is magnificent. Slade, the rummy poet anarchist, the man who likes to pretend he watches life with cynical dispassion from the grandstand, who claims to invite and welcome death, is a role full of traps. It is hard to separate Slade's sodden grandiloquence ("Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!") from Eugene O'Neill's own penchant for overstuffing his dialogue. Ryan does it by animating and underscoring every line, each inflection with a vast, crumbling dignity, a lacerating honesty...
...that bespeak technical competence or clinging T shirts that display reassuring reserves of sexuality or brawn. But Ben Gazzara, captain of the Neptune, appears in blue oxford shirt and cranberry cardigan, as if he had suited up for a Sunday brunch. Gazzara further emphasizes his distance from this whole sodden scientific adventure by remaining resolutely unimpressed whenever some monster fish is loosed upon the Neptune by the special-effects department. Instead of gaping on cue like the rest of the cast. Gazzara merely looks disgusted. As well he might...
...hold him against the release of ten political prisoners. But, as one character remarks, "nothing happens as we intend." Acting as his customary farce majeure, Greene has the revolutionaries mistakenly snatch and fruitlessly hold for political ransom poor Charley Fortnum, a gentle, sixtyish, befuddled and more than slightly sodden Englishman who serves as honorary British consul in an upcountry town that boasts only three British passports...
Victorian children, the author writes, were widely regarded as "little defective adults, sodden with original sin," which could only be squeezed out of them by cramping disciplines. One of nanny's first jobs was to institute rules and punishments regulating eating and elimination. All food on the plate had to be eaten, or it would appear at the next meal. Failure to perform potty at the proper hour (training began at six weeks) brought the certain retribution of laxative powder. Nannying appears to have provided parents with some peculiar satisfactions. As proof that the popularity of the system spread...