Word: witting
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...opposed an antibusing amendment. Senate Leaders Hush Scott and Mike Mansfield registered disapproval. Congressional conservatives and liberals alike were in agreement with Yale Law Professor Alexander Bickel's view: "There is no way to fine-tune a constitutional amendment to deal solely with busing. It is beyond the wit of the most articulate draftsman, and it trivializes the Constitution...
Though puns may be used to political advantage-or disadvantage-punning has traditionally been more the farm of the artist than the playground of the politician. By punning, which probably derives from the Italian puntiglio (fine point), the writer grows ideas as well as wit. Aristophanes punned, with scatological exuberance, and so did Homer and Cicero. What was occasional in the classicists was fecund nature to Shakespeare. Because he had to play to the galleries, his plays were par for the coarse, brimming with such verbal pratfalls as "Discharge yourself of our company, Pistol." But Shakespeare could also buff...
...cuecards to boot? Patrick Magee is the second lead, the writer, and in his crucial scenes he's an embarrassment--he drums his fingers and stares wildly ceilingwards like a resurrected Dwight Frye. The officials act like they're in drag, and the thugs are morons, without the gutter wit that makes them interesting in Peckinpah...
...piece, is all." Higgins may do for "is all" what Salinger's Holden Caulfield did for "and all" in The Catcher in the Rye. Still another Boston locution is the proliferation of the word "there," uttered as often and as meaninglessly as "well" elsewhere in the U.S. To wit: "When he was in Billerica the last time there," or, "So this broad hollers at me there." It would gladden the heart of Gertrude Stein there...
...water turns hard and men's skins are white. He is quick, deadly; he kills two soldiers with a spear; the princess is fascinated; he unsettles her lewdly with suggestions of non-incest; he talks of dominion over all the king doms of the valley, and has the wit, while breaking tradition, to wrap him self in new myth; he is the quick, stinging Scorpion God. She is tempted. Egypt begins...