Word: witting
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...week's crop of witnesses came before the committee, they summoned up a picture of the proper Nixonian apparatchik: gray-suited, pinstriped, self-contained, admirably cool under fire and ever so slightly slow of wit. Obviously avoiding the counterculture and all its works, they suggested every parent's ideal of an obedient son-a trifle too obedient, as it turned out. They were treated paternally by Senator Sam Ervin, rather indulgently by the other committee members, who were doubtless mindful of the witnesses' lowly status and relative innocence in the Nixon campaign organization. They were followers rather...
...20th century, that floor became cluttered with the jargon and rhetoric of specialists and experts. Occasionally, a native wit would appear and be lionized for his logic-Will Rogers, for example, or for that matter, Dr. Spock, who shrewdly titled his 1946 volume The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. But by midcentury, sense was no longer common. Today the American public can be intimidated by those who ask Chico Marx's question: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes...
...goals remains endless. After years of generously funded studies, pundits announce what the canny observer has concluded without aid: that airports have grown less efficient, for example, or that the poor are more victimized by crime than the middle class. Specialization, abstraction and rhetorical overkill - all have made native wit afraid to show its face. Political candidates no longer employ the folk idiom in their speeches. Humorists rarely use the short, acute idiom of Lincoln, Twain - or a Hoosier caricaturist named Kin Hubbard. A pity. In the voice of Abe Martin, a wise old rustic, Hubbard once cracked: "Ther...
...recalls H. Montgomery Hyde, a former M.P. who studiously attempts in the Observer to place the current Lord Lambton-Lord Jellicoe sex scandals in historical per spective. Lloyd George was one of Britain's most notorious amorous Prime Ministers. But he was a man of stern principle, to wit: "Love is all right if you lose no time...
Judith Rascoe, 31, is an ex-English teacher and a screenwriter. This is her first book. A first book of short stories, moreover, is generally one of literature's less attended events. But this book asks the attention due an accomplished talent. It stakes out through wit, intelligence, and dry elegance of style a small but classical province of human experience...