Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...often the class will repair to a nearby bistro for a firsthand look at the living art. Reisner, who systematically began scrutinizing lavatory walls four years ago and has published two paperback collections of graffiti, believes that the golden age of the graffito is here. In addition to the wit on washroom walls, there is the contemporary lapel-button fad, which he describes as "walking graffiti." The fact is, says Reisner, that "graffiti may be the only creative outlet for some adults...
...word for it. In Japan, speakers were once measured by their ability to stare protesters down, but heckling has become rare since World War II. Heckling is most common in Britain, where it is something of an art, designed to test a speaker's combativeness and quickness of wit. Appropriately, the word comes from the Middle English "hekele," to tease or comb flax, or broadly "to tease with questions...
...professor of history with a wry wit promulgated his theory of the work-time syndrome: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." That shrewd and accurate observation became known as Parkinson's Law, after its founder, C. Northcote Parkinson, 59. Now comes "Mrs. Parkinson's Law," aimed at the harried housewife who hopes to keep both her sanity and her spouse: "Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind," goes the latest Parkinson principle. What all that bafflegab means, says Parkinson...
There is oleaginous Alexander Woollcott, larding it over Broadway in the person of Jock Livingston-without any sense of what made Woollcott the most powerful critic of his time. There is Noel Coward, every precious diphthong faultlessly mimicked by Daniel Massey -with only the barest dash of the saline wit that has kept him quoted for almost 50 years. And there is Gertrude Lawrence, played by Julie Andrews. Visually, Julie has vanished into the part. The pert little nose has been thickened, the hairline lowered, the eyebrows thinned, the mouth made severe and straight. It is only the emotional makeup...
...elist's nightmare she has stumbled upon. Confronting a homicidal maniac, she says: "I was drifting between James M. Cain and Kathleen Norris." Unfortunately, that is also the drift of Sagan's seventh novel, which is a little more weird than her usual blend of native wit and updated Colette. The characters and setting are American, but Dorothy Seymour, Hollywood scriptwriter, may as well be one of Sagan's Parisian cocottes: she wears St. Laurent copies, vacations on the Riviera, suffers liver attacks and has a quintessentially Gallic attitude toward love. Her latest suitor, Paul Brett...