Word: vulgarisms
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...blocks from Durgin Park (on Haymarket Square) is Mondo's, a sober truck stop with a great juke. Tucked inconspicuously between two blackened buildings, it's relatively simple, except for its one charmingly vulgar extravagance. On the most prominent wall hangs an immense oil painting of a nude with crimson lipstick, enormous entrees, and a torso elongated beyond the elasticity of the human anatomy. The obvious, but affable errors in the painting speak well for Mondo's as a restaurant. It gets away with a great deal because it's a truck stop and people there wear white socks...
...plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott, "he had best stop writing for them." Such scoldings came despite Mark Twain's prepublication agreement to eliminate references to blasphemy, bad odors, dead cats, and to change...
...Merrick once snapped: "I want people to stop swallowing the pap these mediocrities are churning out." But as a prosecution witness in the obscenity trial of the raunchy off-Broadway sex-and-protest farce Che!, the Broadway tycoon churned out some pretty potent criticism of his own: "Patently offensive, vulgar, lewd and very dull." Playwright Lennox Raphael, in Merrick's view, "had no talent whatsoever and should seek vocational guidance...
...blouse-collar over one breast. Her husband left her after one night. Banker has house with swimming pool within easy Rolls Royce distance of London. He likes to swim, she cannot. Also on hand is a quack faith healer. These elements might have been mixed into some sort of vulgar melodrama; with Pritchett, the story becomes a parable of the things that divide and unite man and woman. Love is not blind; it is a heightened sense of knowledge and of touch...
...convergence theory, in the words of Kremlinologist Bertram Wolfe, is "vulgar Marxism." It posits a fundamentalist belief in economic determinism that Marx himself would probably have disavowed. It ignores or underrates the role played by traditions, value systems and even national characteristics in deciding the future of societies. The concepts that people have of national characteristics, of course, are often mere caricatures, but they generally contain some truth, of a subtler variety than meets the eye. The American devotion to individualism and freedom can be exaggerated; yet the Lockean principles of individual liberty and ordered freedom that underlie...