Word: tartness
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...also a witty critic who can sometimes be more eloquent in prose than he is in verse. In the opening address at the National Poetry Festival in Washington (the first in U.S. history), Jarrell surveyed American poetry and the poets of this century and delivered himself of some tart judgments. Excerpts...
...imposes any recognizable pattern on the various narrative fragments. Arthur Brown, to take only one other example, has suddenly sprouted a Falstaffian beard and manner: in the book, of course, he is the mildest and most sober of men. In fact, only G. H. Winslow, the College's delightfully tart ex-Bursar, and M. H. L. Gay, the Senior Fellow, retain any of their Snow-given characteristics; and their function is minor and wholly comic. The other figures are inadequately drawn and only sketchily donnish...
Rocking the Boat, by Gore Vidal. Tart darts at some hidebound U.S. foibles by a young and politically active writer of many parts...
Other women writers bring out the best in her shrewd, sharp judgment. She displays a witchy admiration for the "tart effervescence" of Mary McCarthy, accurately noting that the cool, almost brutal realism of her sexual passages is light-years away from the passion-tinged descriptions of male writers. One notorious McCarthy story, she writes, "is about contraception in the way, for instance, that Frank Norris's The Octopus is about wheat. There is an air of imparting information-like whaling in Melville." Reviewing Simone de Beauvoir's prolix attack on male imperialism. The Second Sex, Hardwick pricks...
...Tart Replies. In the Senate, Byrd's power is seldom exhibited before the galleries. Ordinarily, he is a poor speaker. But when his dander is up, his oratory can be blistering. His reply to criticism from Florida's Claude Pepper in 1946 is a Senate legend: "When I became a member of the Senate, a distinguished colleague said to me that it never paid to get into a contest with a skunk." When Hubert Humphrey, as a freshman Senator, had the temerity to call Byrd's Joint Committee on the Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures an example...