Word: vulgarizer
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Glenn, reviewing a new book for the Globe on the history of toothpicks, discovered that in 1860s New England “polite society regarded public tooth-picking as vulgar...
...quickly. In the weeks leading up to the April 2006 election, Berlusconi trailed by double digits in the polls. But then the Old Silvio kicked into gear: he made unrealistic but enticing promises to eliminate the housing tax, at a small meeting of business leaders, he used a vulgar expression to describe his opponents - then he repeated the same word to thousands at a basketball arena in Naples. Instead of losing by 10 percentage points, he lost by a few thousand votes. Now he must again find a way to reconnect with the People beyond naming a party after them...
...Producers, Mel Brooks's musicalized version of his 1967 film comedy, was an out-of-the-blue, ain't-Broadway-grand surprise when it opened in the spring of 2001. A septuagenarian funnyman adapts one of his old movies for the stage, writes the songs himself, indulges all his vulgar-vaudevillian comic impulses, and shows the Broadway pros how to do it - what could be more thrilling? And so, when Brooks went back to his film archives to perform the same trick with Young Frankenstein, his horror-movie spoof from 1974, the buzz on Broadway was that another...
Rorty compares Nabokov, the author of aesthetic bliss who despised all vulgar political propaganda and “topical trash,” with Orwell, the earnest, morally courageous author of clumsy allegories. He bases his ideal of the “liberal ironist” on this opposition, confronting the unsettling truth that the Nietzschean ethic of self-creation and eternal struggle can often conflict with the liberal politics of J.S. Mill...
...grow to look like their dogs, sometimes spokesmen begin to resemble their candidates. That's certainly true of Kevin Madden, Mitt Romney's national press secretary, though his neat, Romneyesque looks are quickly belied by a thick New York accent. Shifting seamlessly between sound bites and genial (if sometimes vulgar) humor, Madden, 35, has kept the campaign from getting too rattled by Romney's occasional malapropisms and gaffes. The effortlessness with which he laughs off Romney's missteps (when Romney told Fox News that his favorite novel was a sci-fi tome by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Madden chided...