Word: witting
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...genteel Buckley clan of fashionable rural Connecticut has long championed free enterprise and political conservatism with considerable charm, commendable wit and decided moral convictions. But the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a 3½-year investigation of Buckley-controlled oil and gas companies, last week portrayed the family's own business practices as unethical and even unlawful. In effect, it accused the companies of having defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest...
...OTHER ACTORS, though facing lesser challenges, capture almost as high a pitch of intensity. The vaguely Old World accent of Mr. Glas, at first simply a deadpan foil for Randall's wit, soon begins to play vigorously against him with ironic understatement. Reiffel plays the role with all the control that it demands, sharing in the sense of rapid-fire, back-and-forth timing that make Glas's exchanges with Randall--whether dramatic or humorous--come off so well. The control holds up when it is most needed, at the play's conclusion, when Glas reveals much about his past...
...conditions that brought different immigrant populations to the New World and their adaptation to its opportunities and frustrations objectively. To a large extent, he succeeds, for what he sacrifices in passion and fury, he compensates with the conviction of his honesty. What his narrative loses in style and wit--Sowell's is a turgid, textbook monotone--he gains in clarity and precision. "The history of American ethnic groups," says Sowell, "is the history of a complex aggregate of complex groups and individuals. It cannot be a simple morality play." He seeks to explain events from their causes...
...Eyen's cliched book and lyrics lack the wit and satiric bite that infused his Mary Hartman scripts. With lines like "Show business is a rough business, and it is a business," we feel we're watching a 1930s movie musical in technicolor with Bennett trying to do a Busby Berkeley turn. The choreography here however, lacks flair, Henry Krieger's music is a mediocre imitation of the '60s sound, and this extended, boring production reduces the audience to waiting for the girls' next costume change in their $1.5 million wardrobe...
Beyond its wit, the language of Riddley Walker haunts and challenges in a way that English cannot. Where English is insufficient, Hoban simply invents penetrating new words. The gnawing sensation of terror inside the stomach is the "fearbelly"; both the sight and sound of an angry dog are expressed by "grooling and smarling...