Word: spading
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Throughout Rationale, Legman is concerned with a transcendent purity every bit as excessive and unattainable as the perfect body cleanliness of the deodorant-happy culture he abhors. His views on the psychological roots of dirty jokes, while delivered with ingenuity, verve and color (Legman will always call a spade a goddam shovel), belong to the Freudian orthodoxy as laid down by the master in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious...
Died. James Robertson Justice, 70, doughty, spade-bearded Scottish actor; following a series of strokes; in King's Somborne, England. Gruff-voiced and massive (270 lbs.), Justice appeared in more than 40 films, among them Moby Dick, Les Misérables and The Guns of Navarone. He was best known as the irascible surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt in the British Doctor comedy series of the 1950s...
...author, "will complain that the quotes in this book cannot be accurate, and this is probably true." The problem is not one of accuracy but of familiarity. Benchley's frail chronicle offers the standard stories of Hollywood's old rebel, who pursued independence the way Sam Spade sought the Maltese falcon. Defining the difference between himself and most everybody else, Bogart used to claim that the world was about two drinks behind. Benchley, with his arch collage of pictures and incidents, is a lot farther back than that...
...Honor for killing 20 enemy soldiers in a fit of rage after seeing his friends destroyed: why his mother who brought him up as a Christian is so proud of his being honored for killing: and why the medal should transform him overnight from a down-and-out "spade" to a privileged citizen estranged from the rest of the poor black community. At the same time he clings to the medal, for it distinguishes him and protects...
...cynicism. The detective's ultimate values are never really cynical--if they were he'd be the criminal and not the detective, whether he's Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's insufferable Miss Marples or Alec Guinness playing Chesterton's quaint Father Brown or Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade explaining, after Miles Archer's murder, that you have a duty to your partner...