Word: witting
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...clearly relished debating his record. Slouching on his bus in a blue satin warmup jacket, he was sharp, combative and a bit relieved to be talking about things he knows inside out. He could tell stories about the leader he believes himself to be: the guy whose magnetism and wit got things done in Austin, and got all those now jittery Republican leaders on board his campaign long before anyone had heard of McCain's Straight Talk Express...
Thanks to high-tech baby-making techniques, women and men will increasingly no longer need to mate in the traditional ways, and Barbara Ehrenreich explores the implications with Swiftian wit. Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, says goodbye to politics, predicting that instead religion will become the primary force in shaping society. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, takes a different tack in answering the question, "Who Will Be the Next Elite?" The answer: not yesterday's Wasp or today's SAT high scorer, but the young entrepreneur...
...times, Parker's verbal wit is the match that lights otherwise dull embers. Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, benefits greatly from her title and written explication--"Georgian silver spoon drawn to the height of Niagara Falls." Likewise, Measuring Liberty with a Dollar, made of a silver dollar drawn into a wire the height of the Statue of Liberty, is not primarily a visual experience. If we didn't have Parker's clever titles and explanations, one work might easily be cast aside as a messy tangle of wire, while the other, neatly coiled, has only some nice, simple formal qualities...
...best of Parker's work, like "Room for Margins," depend on such effective combinations of the visual and the narrative aspects of her art. The most memorable have as much visual as verbal wit, and can stand alone without the extra information, the story, imparted by the caption. A visit to a firearm factory yielded two Colt 45 revolvers, arrested mid-production and polished, so that they look soft and immature, almost harmless. Visually, the pair of handguns look like two Nefertitis moving in for a kiss...
...After the Restoration, the Comedy of Manners took over as the dominant form of drama, so theater began to focus more on language and wit and there was less brute physicality. Think about the precursors to the Oscar Wilde-type play, where it's all about the aristocracy sitting around pontificating about how wealthy and bored they are. Throw some torture in there and it just wouldn't work...