Word: witting
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...there are malcontents: "Every now and then an old man, overtaken by a younger . . . turns to blame . . . the social order which makes possible the indignity he feels." And until testing methods were made foolproof, parents high in the meritocracy tried to give their occasional stupid children the appearance of wit, then ease them "into a cosy corner of one of the less exacting professions, such as law or stockbroking...
...shocked conservatives by proposing that some marble panels be removed from the interior of St. Mark's to give worshipers a better view, but he was dead against a proposal to set up gambling facilities in St. Mark's Square. Once he aimed a shaft of wit at the scantily clad tourists who swarm the city in the summertime: "People need not come to Italy in furs or woollens. They can come dressed in that modern American silk, fresh and soft, which is a veritable refrigerator at low cost. Italy, on the other hand...
...Broadway to the core, He is not the only recent playwright whose treatment of a stylish professional world, by comparison with The Man Who Came to Dinner, for example, seems raspingly lacking in style. Once More, With Feeling has none of the stealthy purr-and-scratch of music-world wit; rascals are roughnecks, megalomaniacs commit mayhem, bull fiddles see red. There is not a touch of urbane caricature, it is all plebeian cartooning; and even on its own would be broad popular terms, the play has no real Broadway bounce...
...bell. The would-be lovers fail, but that is because the clapper gives off a frightful clang that scares them both frigid. All of this will come as no surprise to fans of British Novelist Iris Murdoch (The Sandcastle), a philosophy-teaching Oxford don and an intellectual pixy whose wit ends in tears, whose sentences are transparent while her meanings are opaque...
Author Murdoch mitigates the sordid in her story with a flow of wit that is civilized, unobtrusive and sometimes lethal. The novel achieves distinction in a series of brief sermons and reflections on the nature of God and the good that ought to make many an orthodox pulpit-pounding clergyman blush in envy. Yet the meaning of The Bell is muffled in final ambiguity, as the colony goes under in a tidal wave of newspaper scandal. With its strange but oddly exciting characters, its limpid prose, its sly wit and its ethical insight, The Bell unquestionably tolls...