Word: witting
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Beijingers have a reputation in China for aloofness and a dry, self-mocking wit. According to Wang Shuo, China's most famous modern novelist, it's a sense of irony developed over centuries as a way of living with the fallout from the capital's endless factional power struggles. If so, the capital's 17 million residents are getting an excellent opportunity to test their famous detachment this week as Beijing hosts the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The get-together, held once every five years, sees senior cadres of the 70 million-strong Party gather...
...goes throughout Elizabeth. Wit might have animated it. Or authentic passion. Or a certain imperiousness in Blanchett's playing, a certain dangerousness in Owen's. But the movie wants to see them as more modern figures - earnest, good-natured, embryonic democrats. Elizabeth, as a number of movies have proved over the decades, was a great historical figure but not a great dramatic one. The historical Queen undoubtedly had tolerant and democratic impulses of the kind that are imputed to her here. But she was also a canny, hidden and manipulative monarch, not given to broad, emotionally riveting gestures. I suppose...
...real-life molehills. Roberts' first written dissent, published six months after he joined the court, seemed to accuse the majority of making the world safe for wife beaters. The case at hand dealt with a fillip in the vast edifice of Fourth Amendment law governing police searches. To wit: What if a husband and wife are together at their home and the wife invites the police in to search for her husband's drug paraphernalia but the husband says no? Is the consent of just one spouse sufficient? Previous courts had handled the slightly different instance in which one spouse...
...people there, common wisdom insists, are weirdoes, losers, those whose life plans have not panned out. Otherwise they would be out there in the “scene” that dozens of them claim to be tired of, meeting people on their own and charming them with their wit (44 posts), intelligence (545), or quality of being “hottt” (2). Whenever I want to tell friends or roommates about a particularly humorous ad I’ve discovered, I must first weigh my options. Is it worth admitting that I read Craigslist? That I read...
...cleave to rules and strictures that seem to do him only harm. In Guy’s eventual attainment of happiness, Waugh crafts a condemnation of a modernity that discards traditions simply for the sake of discarding them, a modernity he paints as disordered and disconnected. The dry wit and fantastic characters for which Waugh is famous neatly counterbalance the enormity of Guy’s personal journey, as Waugh raises questions about progress and society that seem just as relevant and countercultural today as they did 50 years...