Word: witting
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...assistant to the Director of the Budget. "I'm a second-generation bureaucrat," he says without apology. After the Eisenhower sweep, Neustadt went first to Cornell as an assistant professor of public administration, then in 1954 he joined the Columbia Department of Government. A lively lecturer and wit, he had more students than there were seats in his class, with late arrivals parked on the floor...
...Eliot was modest, kind, immensely loyal to his friends. He was thought to be formidably reserved, but that was because he did not like casual chatter and hated to be lionized. Among close friends, he was unfailingly good company. His grave courtesy concealed astringent wit; he also liked jokes of the kind where the cushion, when sat on, makes a rude noise. He was tirelessly, patiently encouraging to young poets who wrote or sent manuscripts to him at Faber & Faber, the London publishing house where for many years he was a partner...
...doom and damnation on the idolatrous race of men. He is God's angry man, a prophet of the wrath to come who screams with infernal glee as he opens the vials of vituperation on the heads of humankind. His passions are scoriae, his imagination a holocaust. His wit is an indentured imp that leaps to any bidding-it can tickle the funny bone, attack with acid, fry living flesh on a deadpan, reach down the throat of a corpse and come up with a ghastly guffaw. His language is bare, strong, lucid, manly: perhaps the most intensely concentrated...
...same could not be said for the shape of U.S. foreign relations. One of the President's visitors at the ranch was Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who flew down to brief him on the latest turns in the perennial Viet Nam crisis. One prominent White House wit held that the mess in Viet Nam was no worse than the mess inside the Republican Party, but the joke really wasn't very funny. The fact is that, for all his domestic achievements, Johnson has not yet fully applied his talents or his energies to dealing with the rest...
Despite the phony dramaturgy of the script and narration, F.D.R. is one more victory for F.D.R. His warmth, his charm, his wit and his arrogance are everywhere in the pictures of him. When the raw material is left alone, it is most eloquent. There is, for instance, a splendid home-movie clip of a dozen or so of his fellow polio victims, all youngsters, surrounding him and eventually inundating him in a water-polo game at Warm Springs. And there is a delightful illustration of Roosevelt's jaunty sense of perquisite as he is being piped aboard a light...