Word: witting
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...Beauty Part is not a collection of isolated gags. From Greenwich Village to Hollywood, the play is stitched throughout with the oblique, neatly sutured, thematic wit of S. J. Perelman. The display of words is, in fact, so dazzling that any mail-order Melville in the audience must get the message along with the fellow from Yale: "Lay off the Muses. It's a very tough dollar...
...only direct descendant, corporately speaking, of Noah Webster,* who in 1828 produced the first truly American dictionary, which in its 70,000 listings stressed the New World's lusty new words, from applesauce to skunk. The descendants have never matched Noah's style, clarity and wit. He was a practical man given to phonetic spelling (ake, crum, skreen). He was a feeling man given to personalizing his definitions: "All sin is hateful in the sight of God and of good men." Or: "In short, we love whatever gives us pleasure and delight, whether animal or intellectual...
...reading the record of Welles' career: highly praised but abortive plans for peace conferences in 1939, polite missions to the Axis leaders, "lucid and well-informed" reports on the Munich crisis. It is a kind of tragic record of the death throes of personal diplomacy. A man of wit, fore-night, honor, and good-will was totally incapable of deflecting a catastrophic course of events. Leadership that would have resulted in a "peace with honor" in the days of Talleyrand had no way of even comprehending a Hitler or a Mussolini...
...personal-neither jeweled cenotaph nor mantic dispatches from a muse, but gifts of self. One reflects, while reading them (dropping a mental footnote to the chalkier conundrums of Pound and Eliot), how lightly the weight of their author's erudition bears down. Graves can write with warm wit, in Friday Night, of a meeting between Jove and Love...
...Death of Tragedy, by George Steiner. Well equipped with caustic wit as well as learning, the author ably follows his subject from Aeschylus to Brecht...