Word: underlay
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Despite the sophistication that underlay her slapstick and the respect she commanded as the first woman to head a studio, Desilu Productions, Ball said she saw herself as "not an idea girl but a doer." Like the silent comedians she studied (Buster Keaton, her onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz...
...needed any further hallmarks, several hundred people gathered at a church service in Georgetown to remember American Hostage Terry Anderson, 40, on the third anniversary of his kidnaping in West Beirut, a poignant reminder of the frustrations that underlay one leg of the Iran-contra affair...
Like many American artists since, West came to believe in his own greatness too early. It gave him the self-confidence that turns to bombast. Much of his work is thin and overstretched. In the insecurities that underlay his rhetorical sweep, West remained somewhat provincial, but the big historical "machines" he painted for English clients partake of Jeffersonian ideas precisely because those ideas were also current in Europe -- particularly the notion that the morality of republican Rome, its emphasis on pietas, obligation and memory, plainness and bravery, could underwrite a new republican state...
...LAWS of national sovereignty are themselves based on the fundamental principle of self-determination. The same principle that underlay Nigerian claims to independence decades earlier could have been invoked to legitimate outside intervention on the Ibo's behalf. Indeed, the French government of Charles de Gaulle, before initiating covert military assistance to the rebels, declared: "The bloodshed and suffering of the Biafran people for more than a year shows their will to affirm themselves as a people...
...final segment of the section was written by Senior Writer Ezra Bowen, who acknowledges an intense, longtime interest in ethics. Bowen is a 1949 graduate of Amherst College, where he studied history and philosophy (and starred at first base on the baseball team). His belief in ethical obligations underlay a major part of a commencement address he delivered earlier this month at Texas Lutheran College in Seguin, and he will return to the topic on May 24 at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., when he receives an honorary doctor of letters...