Word: wit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...replaced communicating your charms in hieroglyphic SWF-form with a Cosmo-style quiz. You got to name your most humbling moment, choose your favorite sex scene in a movie and come up with words for lines like "Blank is sexy; blank is sexier." Desperate contractions were replaced by insta-wit and faux self-deprecation. Taylor and Sharkey's questionnaire is now used by more than 150 newspapers and websites and has been filled out by 2 million registered users, a million of whom are trawling for dates right now. It is the horoscope of our times...
...When Lewis died last week at the age of 95, the world remembered him for the seamless polish of his prose, the quiet subversion of his deadpan wit and, perhaps, for the fortitude, stoicism and sense of curiosity that had once been Britain's best contribution to the world-at-large. Yet those of us in Asia owe him a particular debt for his two post-war books, A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth, which caught Vietnam, Laos and Burma as they will never be seen again. Even more than in his novels, in his study of the Mafia...
...were blessed with bright, beguiling actresses and superb roles tailored to their wit and independence. Hepburn got her share: the virginal "lady flyer" in Christopher Strong, irresistibly manic Jo March in Little Women, the small-town social climber in Alice Adams, the cross-dressing Sylvia Scarlett and another terrific haughty-actress part in Stage Door...
Ever the great imagemaker, he cast himself to the French public as a symbol both of the virtuous frontier freedom romanticized by Rousseau and of the Enlightenment's reasoned wisdom championed by Voltaire. In a clever and deliberate manner, leavened by the wit and joie de vivre the French so adored, he portrayed the American cause, through his own personification of it, as that of the natural state fighting the corrupted one. He made a point of eschewing powdered wigs and formal dress, instead wearing a fur cap he had picked up years earlier on a trip to Canada...
...compare him to Hitler. But that doesn't play so well, as Berlusconi and Däubler-Gmelin have learned. So here is a suggestion: If Continental politicos can't think up a suitable retort of their own, why not borrow a rapier from the arsenal of American wit? There's a classic from Congressman Thomas Brackett Reed in the late 19th century, who said of two rivals that they "never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." If Berlusconi had trotted that one out, he would have heard as many laughs as catcalls, and fine...