Word: twit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...contrast, the steel- butterfly effect, that is fascinating. She is, possibly, a shade too composed and cerebral in her thoroughly adult second film, the delightful period comedy % A Room with a View. Her character, a properly brought-up young person who allows herself to become engaged to a twit, is supposed to be slightly silly, but Bonham Carter does not quite succeed in counterfeiting nitwittedness. She needs to study acting, she knows, and to find time for a university education. She needs to stop being 19. "At the moment I don't have much to impart to the world...
...Larger-than-life wooden silhouettes - two birds, for instance, or a garland of branches - shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium...
...play the prankster? Her intent, as she explains in the preface to an upcoming one-volume paperback edition of the Somers novels, was partly to show how difficult it is for the work of unknown authors to attract wide attention. On a more personal level, she wanted to twit the critics who have insisted on pigeonholing her: first as a feminist writer, later as a purveyor of visionary science fiction. "I wanted to be reviewed on merit, as a new writer, without the benefit of a 'name,' " she asserts, "to get free of that cage of associations...
...Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, Peter Nichols' musical play was a daft and bitter satire on Britain's declining imperial fortunes. A troupe of conscripted music-hall artists bumble and camp their way through post-World War II Singapore, drawing flak from their stiff-upper-twit major and sniper fire from local guerrillas. Alternating farcical skits with wicked song parodies, Privates was a near perfect stage piece, and thus an unsuitable candidate for filming. Some of the songs are gone; the plot is attenuated and detoxified; and Director Michael Blakemore (who also staged the R.S.C. production) has encouraged...
...Unlimited, a national conservation organization, admits, "Where James Watt would never say a four-letter word, Ray would say every one you ever heard and some you haven't." Arnett, a Californian who headed that state's department of fish and game for seven years, likes to twit his environmentalist foes, calling them "tree huggers," "Chicken Little extremists" and "prairie fairies." Some months ago, he supported a tax on the binoculars, books and film used by bird watchers, wildlife photographers and nature lovers, arguing that they should be charged for using the outdoors just as hunters and fishermen...