Word: witting
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What The Folding Green lacks in wit it does not make up in cogency. In the middle of the middle act, a white-wigged actress comes before the curtain to say that the author told her to say that reality and illusion is the theme of his play. This explains why the characters keep dressing up in all sorts of funny costumes and superimposing various new identities on the one with which they started; why real characters keep getting mistaken for ghosts, and vice-versa; and why it is sometimes hard to determine where anybody is at. Evidently Mr. Moss...
...less the prospect of leaving their Forest Hill home in San Francisco for the Governor's mansion in Sacramento, but she jumped into the campaign with surprising verve, even left her sickbed (phlebitis) against doctors' orders to make the election-night rounds with him. Gifted with lively wit, Bernice Brown showed a great talent for joshing her husband out of taking himself too seriously and soothing hurt egos among quarreling members of the inner political family...
What lifted Curley out of the barren pattern set by most other bosses was his wit. Much of it was of a local variety. In 1921 campaigning for Mayor against John R. Murphy, a good Irish Catholic, Curley dressed up a few of his camp followers as priests and sent them across Charlestown and elsewhere bruiting it about that John R. Murphy had renounced his Catholic Faith, joined a Masonic Order, had been observed attending Back Bay's Trinity Church, and intended to divorce his good wife in order to marry a sixteen-year-old girl. As the campaign...
...Curley's wit raises a question that still divides the faculty of the institution he so enjoyed baiting. Was he the colorful old rogue that he has been made lately, or did he do Boston irreparable harm? In his old age he certainly tried to give credence to the former view. Though he grouched about Joseph Dinneen's biography and Edwin O'Connor's novel, he seemed immensely to enjoy the renewed attention they brought him. He gave the books away with such genial inscriptions as may be found in Lamont's copy of The Purple Shamrock: "To Jack: From...
Other members of the faculty have expressed admiration for Curley's wit. Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Warns against a priggish approach to the man. Mr. Louis Lyons, Curator of the Nieman Fellowships, grants him "talent, and a wonderful voice." To Professor John K. Galbraith, "He was clever and articulate, and had both an audacious sense of humor and a highly developed if somewhat indiscriminate imagination." Professor Oscar Handlin sees in the man "a certain kind of charm, and a lot of blarney...