Word: witlessness
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Unfortunately, Mr. Storrer's valiant efforts are over balanced by Mr. Gilbert's somewhat witless book. Of all the G and S satires, Patience is undoubtedly the most dated and least funny. The poetry of the pre-Raphaelite aesthetics is about as current as the hula-hoop. And, with only a few notable exceptions, the frenetic efforts of this year's troupe simply cannot disguise Bab's droning...
...days of penance on a train. His pendulous life is governed by back-room fortunetellers who write and rewrite the timetables. His journey is shepherded by faceless men in visored hats who carry metal beetles that chew up tickets and disgorge the microscopic confetti on the vests of the witless passengers. He knows not what his sins are; he just lives in the dim suspicion that at some Last Stop the Great Dispatcher will explain everything. But he never gets there; imprisoned aboard the mysterious rattler, he can only hope to wedge his way past his fellow riders into...
...Philip Sidney, of whom Dinger has vaguely heard, Boone is a "real mug" with "no future." Yet for a while, Dinger and Boone are "chinas," or buddies.* They try to assert their individuality against the khaki mass, against superior officers who are "189% swine," and against the witless cruelty of a state that knows nothing but its own welfare. They form a club of two-the "indes" or independents-against the "packers," the Pack Faction, whose boots, they realize, they must lick or wear. Their club HQ is in the branches of a huge oak, where, in the ancient fashion...
...unreconstructed individualist, Still pours odium and contempt on his contemporaries, scorns their "witless parodies" and "capering before an expanse of canvas...
...defenseless suffer and die more often than the clashing soldiery. The battle scenes are well and cleanly done, but too often the author's flag-waving enthusiasm for Zionism diminishes rather than exalts the achievement of the Israelis, particularly when Uris pictures the Arabs either as witless dupes or as "the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners and white slavers...