Word: witting
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Unpleasant Fact. Like everybody else, columnists were taken by surprise. Nevertheless, New York Post Theater Critic Richard Watts Jr. found the wit to quip that "it is safe to predict that someone will soon be blaming Lyndon Johnson for the whole ugly Middle Eastern crisis." Sure enough, someone soon was. The very next day, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Columnist Marquis Childs declared that the "real significance" of the war is that the "Johnson brand of consensus diplomacy has disastrously failed"-an interpretation that, had they read it, would have certainly startled the Arabs and Israelis-not to mention the Russians...
...soft-sell show inside is quite another matter. For in choosing to combine levity with patriotism, the designers of the U.S. exhibit have let themselves in for a scorching controversy in which comments range from soaring praise ("a masterpiece of pleasing self-irony," "no less profound for its easy wit and beauty") to bruising brickbats ("a sterile disaster," "it stinks"). No one, it seems, is neutral...
Against this background stands Robert Traill Spence Lowell. Echoes of many of his predecessors and colleagues can be found here and there in his work, although he lacks the resigned elegance and orthodox Christianity of Eliot, the homespun philosophy of Frost, the intellectual subtlety of Stevens, the wit of Auden, the wild...
Ordinarily, General Motors Chairman Fred Donner keeps his wit to himself. Last week, after Donner and G.M. President James M. Roche delivered their annual state-of-the-company report to stockholders, the chairman was needled by critics about the size of his salary and bonus (a total $790,000 last year...
With luck, The Happening might have happened to be a passable picture. But Director Elliot Silverstein, forgetting everything he learned on Cat Ballou, makes his players move with galvanic gestures and broad grimaces that would be too gross for a marionette show. Moreover, the script's idea of wit consists of having George Maharis, as one of the bums, end most of his sentences in the same way: "Bam! Et cetera." "We're all in this together. Et cetera...