Word: upmanship
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Whatever its material from burlap to brocade, a hostess gown assures the lady of the house comfort, glamour, and a kind of one-upmanship on her guests. After a day over the old hot stove, she can slip quickly and ungirdled into the easy camouflage of full-length draperies. And while her guests have had to settle for party dresses of unspectacular street length (the better to get in and out of cabs or family cars), they are sure to find their basic blacks outshone by the lady in skirts who rustles out from the kitchen with...
...Charles Percy Snow is a novelist of one-upmanship in British science and politics. But seldom has Snow's fiction matched his life in the past year or so. His novel, The Affair, became a London stage hit that is Broadway bound; his Harvard lectures, "Science and Government," roused a storm that roiled the Establishment. Last month Critic F. R. Leavis subjected him to a savage literary mugging, and soon after, Snow suffered a detached retina that may cost the sight of his left eye. But last week Sir Charles ignored all trials for a new triumph: his installation...
...younger generation of English composers. Perhaps because he flunked out of Oxford for failing algebra, he has never had the slightest interest in "mucking about the tone-rows." And even if he did, he is not persuaded that it would help his reputation. These days, Walton observes, musical one-upmanship has become such a complex art that "it is quite possible to go in and out of fashion four or five times during one's lifetime...
...even today's sophomores are likely to lose their critical faculties over a ghost of the '30s like Clifford Odets; nor. as E. B. White proves in a one-page version of Somerset Maugham, is the jejune quality of the Old Party's dinner-jacketed one-upmanship likely to delude the young. The wonder is, Twentieth Century Parody suggests, that there has been so much style in the last 60 years to be worth parodying...
...anybody knows who has ever played the game, musical one-upmanship requires the gall of a party-crasher, the guile of a tax consultant, and the memory of an IBM machine. The winning player must know what musical names to drop at the right time: if he is naive enough to mention Jean Sibelius just now, he is sure to lose points, while Gustav Mahler will get him a lot of mileage this season, and he will do well almost any year with the really unknown names (Karl Ditters von Dit-tersdorf) that make his opponents uneasy. But what separates...