Word: witlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dulcinea Smith is a witless, bromidic, meddlesome but well-meaning woman with a mania for engineering other people's lives. She gives a weekend house-party, and manages to have a finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth. She tries to fix her husband's business deals and do a little matchmaking on the side. She spouts cliches and misquotations with amazing volubility. It is she who arranges a bridge game before supper because "it would be sort of soothing," and then proceeds to ask whether hearts are higher than spades and whether she "should discard from...
...lyrics are from a jukebox hit called Witch Doctor, by Ross (Come on-a My House) Bagdasarian, and in the pop industry, which apes itself with witless intensity, they have contributed to a recent style in novelty numbers: the use of speeded-up or doctored tape to achieve nonsensical vocal effects. The Little Blue Man climbed the charts briefly because it had a whiningly metallic voice whispering "I wuv you" at periodic intervals; a new record called What'd He Say? consists of a series of bewildered questioners trying to ungarble answers that invariably degenerate into taped gobbledygook just...
...five. From our two-man, 2½-hour survey, we could obviously not make even tentative assumptions about possibly grave long-term effects (over days, weeks or months) of weightlessness on the human circulatory and respiratory systems. But these suggestions emerged: a weightless man in space need not be witless if he has had time to recover from the probable dulling effect of massive g forces during blastoff; his reasoning powers should be unimpaired; he need be in little danger of injuring himself from muscular overshooting-neither of us overshot objects that we reached for, though we did our reaching...
...tells the Wanderer her story, and when it is done her witless godchild (or was it a goat-child?) has disappeared. The outcast Pythia and the outcast Jew follow his footprints up the mountainside. They grow fainter and fainter, finally disappear altogether. Then she knows. "The father has fetched him home...
...dismal record of eleven victories and twelve defeats. He was almost ready to believe the unkind critics who maintained that he lost his stuff in the clutch. Then things got worse. The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and Big Newk (6 ft. 4 in.) began to worry himself witless over the prospect of being forced to fly from game to game...