Word: spoilsport
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Purdy doesn't wish to be a spoilsport. He's negative only about negativity. Temperamentally, he's an optimist who places his faith in action, not attitude. One issue close to his tender rural heart is the preservation of West Virginia wilderness from the mountain-leveling predations of modern coal mining. A student of law and forestry at Yale, he sees himself arguing his causes in court someday, but his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism. "We need today a kind of thought and action that is too little contemplated yet remains possible...
...various dates) features Thomas Moore, the author of Care of the Soul, and a group of Celtic musicians. With this show, Moore wants us to see Christmas as an occasion that can be celebrated by "people of all faiths or no faith." No one wants to be a spoilsport and criticize such ecumenism, but you wonder at what point a religion's symbols become so generalized that they lose all meaning. Still, Moore might have created a program that combined wonderful music with a discussion of how different religious traditions intersect at Christmas. Instead, he has provided light, pop-Celtic...
...show and is becoming a celebrity in his own right; Bud White (Australian actor Russell Crowe), who's a sweet, plodding sort of guy unless someone visits violence on women, which turns him into a raging brute; and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce, another Aussie), the departmental priss and spoilsport, thoroughly despised by everyone, as moral centers of amoral enterprises should be--until they turn out to have been right all along...
...potential spoilsport in the matter is Carl Lewis, who also wants the schedule changed--in Lewis' case to aid his quest for another gold in either the 200 or the 100. But based on recent performances, Johnson is clearly the more deserving of the two. Besides, track could use the publicity it would get from having Johnson win his two races and be declared the Jesse Owens of this generation...
Probably with this in mind, he took a courageous stance in Rio by defending American economic interests against an international consensus. Yet he was quickly mocked at home as the "spoilsport" in Rio, the undiplomatic one who selfishly focused on his own country's needs while the rest of the world was sharing and playing nicely...