Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Chitlins Wit. Marshall, a gregarious storyteller with a dry wit and a healthy thirst for bourbon and water, has been married since 1955 to Hawaiian-born Cecelia Suyat (his first wife died of cancer a year before), and lives in an integrated neighborhood of Southwest Washington.He is equally comfortable drawling earthy tales in a self-mocking, chitlins-and-cornpone Negro dialect or arguing law in meticulously scholarly tones...
Unpleasant Fact. Like everybody else, columnists were taken by surprise. Nevertheless, New York Post Theater Critic Richard Watts Jr. found the wit to quip that "it is safe to predict that someone will soon be blaming Lyndon Johnson for the whole ugly Middle Eastern crisis." Sure enough, someone soon was. The very next day, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Columnist Marquis Childs declared that the "real significance" of the war is that the "Johnson brand of consensus diplomacy has disastrously failed"-an interpretation that, had they read it, would have certainly startled the Arabs and Israelis-not to mention the Russians...
Died. Dorothy Parker, 73, poet, critic, author, wit; of a heart attack; in Manhattan...
...Algonquin Round Table. Hers was the tongue heard round the world. Her famed couplet, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses," not only set a style for lonely movie heroines but may well have spurred the development of contact lenses. During the long Victorian era, wit had hardly been considered a feminine attribute. Dorothy Parker proved again that bitchiness could be the soul of wit. When she heard the news that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked: "How can they tell?" Of Katharine Hepburn she said: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." After...
Humor was, after all, her basic form of dress and address. And humor passes through the most ephemeral of fashions. The concept of wit, the very word, today suggests a dated elegance. Gone is the vintage innocence, masquerading as chic, that Miss Dorothy Parker symbolized. Things are now laughed about that she would have found vulgar, if not downright indiscreet. Humor today is broad and black. Perhaps it is more human; it is certainly less artificial. Yet the suspicion mounts that behind the laughter of "alienation," there is a wide streak of sentimentality, too, just as there was behind...