Word: spleening
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...joke of The Threepenny Opera seems to be on the authors. For their work is going the way of all universally accepted satire: it is becoming bland and there is little that can be done to reverse the trend. However much the actors try to squeeze out all the spleen in the play, the audience insists on ignoring them and converting Brecht and Weill into Lerner and Loewe...
...Miller's work suggests that the human thymus, in the first weeks of life, produces the basic cells that are then distributed to other white-cell factories, in lymph nodes and the spleen, where cells can be mass-produced at short notice to protect the body against invading microbes or foreign tissue. Once the master cells have been distributed, the thymus seems to have done its main job. In adult life, and even in later childhood, the gland can be removed with little apparent effect. Perhaps it eventually becomes use less, despite its vital early role...
From her forthcoming book on the most vexing associates of her 74 years ("Once famous, one is subjected to nothing but insults"), Dame Edith Sitwell, grande dame of Britain's most imposing and impossible literary family, leaked the first bit of spleen: that D. H. Lawrence would be among her major targets for setting his Lady Chatterley's Lover at the Sitwell estate in Derbyshire and modeling the novel's war-maimed, cuckolded baronet after the elder of her brothers, Sir Osbert. "My brother," noted the Plantagenet-descended poetess, "is a baronet, and he fought like...
...flat denial-a courtesy that not all columnists can afford. She usually punishes those who offend her by keeping them out of her column rather than lambasting them in it. But her wrath, when aroused, has always been formidable. When Producer Nunnally Johnson outraged her dignity, Lolly vented her spleen on his wife. Wrote Lolly: "I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night. She used to be such a pretty girl before she married...
...letter in London's left-wing weekly Tribune, Angry Young Playwright John (The Entertainer) Osborne, 31. showered spleen over his fellow countrymen. Zeroing in on Britain's political leaders from a refuge in southern France. Osborne denounced them as ''murderers" for refusing to dismantle all British nuclear weapons forthwith: "My hatred for you," he wrote, "is almost the only satisfaction you have left me. My favorite fantasy is four minutes or so of noncommercial viewing as you fry in your democratically elected hot seats, preferably with your condoning constituents. I would willingly watch...