Word: wittiest
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...wittiest woman in the world," said Oscar Wilde of Ada Leverson. Others who admired Ada's sparkle were Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw (whom she succeeded as drama critic of the Saturday Review). Venomous with bores, she flattened them joyfully. When a vacation acquaintance buttonholed her with "I don't know whether you realize it ... but my aunt was a Thunderby," Ada cried, "Oh, how terrible! Oughtn't we to inform the management?" Accused of using peroxide on her hair, she flashed that she "only darkened it a little at the roots...
...spade ceremony tops off the whole event. It's the spade that broke ground for the first Wellesley tree planting. Supposedly the two wittiest girls in the freshmen and sophomore class do a skit in which a play on the word spade is used. Here's what might happen today...
...paintings, drawings and prints, gathered together by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, showed Klee at his wittiest, his most charming, and most terrifying. Landscape with Accents and Little Dune Picture had the skilled naivete of antique Chinese drawings, while Lady Demon, Country Dwarf and Mask of Fear were like small windows into a skeleton-filled closet. Exercises, a few squiggly lines portraying an amazed dog watching three uncomfortably contorted human beings, was as sharp and prodding as a Thurber vignette...
Descriptions of Isaiah Berlin range from "the most brilliant man in the Western World" to "the wittiest" to "the best conversationalist." You have an uncomprehending respect for people who so describe him for you feel they belong to the inner circle, the practiced. The outsider suspects the significance of the torrent of Oxford language which pours forth from this round and rumpled gentleman but seldom succeeds in keeping up with his pace. Berlin himself observes that his audiences "first struggle desperately but then sink under, staring with glazed eyes." One intense lady became so desperate that she finally interrupted...
There no longer seems any need for many of the obscurities in Eimi, but the book as a whole grows more pertinent as the years pass. It is certainly the wittiest, and just possibly the most reliable, of all the Moscow traveler accounts...