Word: tweaking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brittle good intentions glare out from the bright pages of this year's children's books, but most are sad failures, lacking equally in anything resembling either joy or pain. Publishers are like elderly relatives who come to visit-they coo, they tweak too many cheeks. Worse than relatives, they also play up to parents by dropping names, and they charge high prices to do it: this year's list includes several books for very small children that cost upwards of $3, putting an unnaturally high price on a child's natural impulse for destruction...
Less gymnastic than their title would suggest, Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies (1888) are pastoral melodies with an extremely simple accompaniment of strings and harp. But even in his most restrained mood, Satie could not resist a final playful tweak: the three pieces end on the "wrong" chord (subdominant); but nobody notices this joke any more, and the Trois Gymnopedies pass, to Satie's undoubted horror, as incorrigibly romantic...
...disseminating vulgarity throughout the rest of the West: "If it fails to resist it, [Europe] must look to its own weaknesses and its own form of spiritual flabbiness. Now you are catching up with us! All Europe is drunk with the same poison!" Up stepped Gamesman Potter to tweak Uncle Sam's nose amidst general merriment. He quoted from a manual for U.S. cemetery-plot salesmen: "It's better to have a plot and no need for it than to need it and not have one." He sneered at a claim of California winegrowers that they have never...