Word: witting
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...often the class will repair to a nearby bistro for a firsthand look at the living art. Reisner, who systematically began scrutinizing lavatory walls four years ago and has published two paperback collections of graffiti, believes that the golden age of the graffito is here. In addition to the wit on washroom walls, there is the contemporary lapel-button fad, which he describes as "walking graffiti." The fact is, says Reisner, that "graffiti may be the only creative outlet for some adults...
...Pike from the beyond and recommended the bishop to a "sensitive" named Ena Twigg. It was in her London sitting room, Pike says, that he first got in touch with Jim. "I am not in purgatory," the boy told his father, "but something like hell, here." He mustered enough wit, however, to remark: "Remember our discussions about life after death? Well, I guess we settled that...
...word for it. In Japan, speakers were once measured by their ability to stare protesters down, but heckling has become rare since World War II. Heckling is most common in Britain, where it is something of an art, designed to test a speaker's combativeness and quickness of wit. Appropriately, the word comes from the Middle English "hekele," to tease or comb flax, or broadly "to tease with questions...
...professor of history with a wry wit promulgated his theory of the work-time syndrome: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." That shrewd and accurate observation became known as Parkinson's Law, after its founder, C. Northcote Parkinson, 59. Now comes "Mrs. Parkinson's Law," aimed at the harried housewife who hopes to keep both her sanity and her spouse: "Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind," goes the latest Parkinson principle. What all that bafflegab means, says Parkinson...
There is oleaginous Alexander Woollcott, larding it over Broadway in the person of Jock Livingston-without any sense of what made Woollcott the most powerful critic of his time. There is Noel Coward, every precious diphthong faultlessly mimicked by Daniel Massey -with only the barest dash of the saline wit that has kept him quoted for almost 50 years. And there is Gertrude Lawrence, played by Julie Andrews. Visually, Julie has vanished into the part. The pert little nose has been thickened, the hairline lowered, the eyebrows thinned, the mouth made severe and straight. It is only the emotional makeup...