Word: wastrel
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...Wastrel Americans...
Lance Morrow's Essay "The Weakness That Starts at Home" [June 4] said it all. America is a shocking wastrel...
...affecting of this honest workman, intruding his democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp that is as loonily effective as Inspector Clouseau's fractured French...
...years foreigners have regarded America (enviously, contemptuously) as a shocking wastrel, besotted with its own resources, lighting its cigars with $1,000 bills. In winter, visitors remark, the U.S. is always too warm indoors, and in summer always too cold; in a flawless little American parable, Richard Nixon used to turn up the White House air conditioning full blast and then start a cozy blaze in the fireplace...
...likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Characters like Lady Margot Metroland, Mayfair hostess and procuress of Decline and Fall, Mrs. Melrose Ape of Vile Bodies, the American evangelist modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson, Basil Seal, highborn wastrel of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast in Scoop, still delight because there are always new grotesques to fill the shoes of Waugh's caricatures. And his work has more serious undertones: extrapolations of what Waugh called "existing social tendencies...