Word: verbalism
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Romance, in Misalliance, is less a consuming or ennobling passion than an excuse for conversation. In Shaw's theater, verbal sparring may be a more socially acceptable pleasure than sex, but it is hardly an innocent one, as its main appeal seems to be outdoing and occasionally humiliating another person. The characters' drive to manipulate each other through ideas reflects Edwardian bourgeois society's obsession with class and the power of appearances...
...double standard between your case and the "Tailhook incident"? You were discharged because of a verbal statement, yet three years after the Navy Secretary said he would not tolerate lewd behavior or sexual harassment, he attended a convention at which 26 women, many of them officers, were manhandled. ((Last week, under pressure, the Secretary resigned his post...
...rallies, Robb is a duplicitous huckster. When protesters in Dubuque, Iowa, toss eggs at him, he responds with a verbal sally. "They are hypocrites!" he shouts. "They are liars. They talk about peace, but there is no peace over there. They are being built up by hatred." Then he tells his fans that they are on a "mission of love" at a "white Christian revival." With his message goes a commercial tie-in. Besides the usual Klan caps and T shirts and stickers, these rallies offer pricey Klan kitsch, like a ceramic statuette of a hooded Klansman whose eyes glow...
...style. Her brothers and old friends insist that she can top tall stories with the best of them -- and that in a land where the gab is the biggest gift of all. Around a dinner table, she and her husband often talk vehemently and at once, taking different verbal paths to the same end -- rather like characters in an opera...
...Nigerian-born, London-based Ben Okri explores the spiritual interior of an African nation struggling to reconcile its traditions with modern dislocations. Sorcerers, ghosts and two-legged dogs mingle with villagers and politicians in this hallucinatory narrative that reconnects Nigeria to its origins. Okri's uncompromising vision and verbal energy carry him swiftly through 500 pages. The reader too moves along, although a little less magic and a bit more realism could have given this extended tour de force more variety and emotional punch...