Word: upmanship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...package of just about everything Americans find detestable in a U-type Englishman. He is expensively accented (Oxford), twice married, with a modest homosexual past, a nonchurchgoing Roman Catholic, but a devout snob and a glutton, a sexman and a Potterish ployman of epic pretensions. His exploits in one-upmanship take the form of a baroque conversational style, impeccable scholarship in cigars, and a collection of snuffboxes with appropriate snuff (antelope horn for the Otterburn mix). He hates progress, Protestants, Negroes, Jews, Americans, today and tomorrow. Such a man, Amis implies, has done very nicely thank-you in England...
...signers were the heads of some of the nation's most successful agencies, and the ad was conceived and written as a bit of sly one-upmanship by Madison Avenue Adman and Bestselling Author David (Confessions of an Advertising Man) Ogilvy...
Bevin's one-upmanship won that round, but the Guatemalans have never given up. Little does it matter to them that Guatemala never once held the swampy, New Hampshire-sized territory east of its border (see map)-or that in 1859 it signed a boundary treaty recognizing British sovereignty. The treaty is invalid, argues Guatemala, because Britain reneged on a promise to build a road across the frontier. The road, says Britain, was supposed to be a joint project. British Hondurans, all 90,000 of them, want no part of annexation by Guatemala; they speak English, are predominantly Negro...
...surprisingly, her hero, Matthew Pryar (Eton and Oxford), contributes some British one-upmanship to the stock drama of poet and pedant. He finds that all is alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation -Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget...
...found not in the novel itself, but in Dr. Fiedler's critical writings-notably Love and Death in the American Novel. Read thus, The Second Stone offers some of the rarest pleasure of the year, combining the attractions of Scrabble, the double-crostic, literary name-spotting and one-upmanship with the humbler delights of the whodunit. This is a parable and the characters are crazy mythed-up people...