Word: witting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...house in London's Chelsea section where several famous poems and plays were written, a plaque was unveiled, thus restoring to the playwright, after some 60 years of disgrace in England, a semblance of respectability. Its terse inscription: "Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, wit and dramatist, lived here." On hand were Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland (who recently described his inherited stigma in Son of Oscar Wilde-TIME, Sept. 27), Actor Michael Redgrave, Poets T. S. Eliot and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Lord Cecil Douglas, grandson of the unforgiving ninth Marquess of Queensberry, whose grim insistence that Wilde go behind...
Taubes is accustomed to a full schedule, however. Ever since his childhood flight from Vienna in 1936, a few weeks before the Nazis overran Austria, the thirty-year old lecturer has filled his life with more activity than most men twice his life wit more activity than most men twice his age. The scion of an old rabbinical family, Taubes worked from 1943 to 1945 with Jesuit priests and the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, in a network of underground groups centered in Zurich...
...amazing old man of 79 spoke slowly, and his lisp was more pronounced. But the wit was as nimble as ever, and the orotund prose as incomparable. In a sly reference to his reputation as a brandy drinker, he called for a glass of water and downed it, remarking with a twinkle: "I only do it to show you that I can." Churchill hailed Eden's achievement at London as "a monument and a milestone in our march toward peaceful coexistence," paid generous tribute to the U.S. (see JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES), spoke again, wistfully, of his dream of coexistence with...
...afternoon, protocol permitting, a six-year-old American boy named Stephen Rutter will be excused from his private school on London's fashionable Eaton Square long enough to go to Buckingham Palace and obey, by approximation, an admonition of the late Mayor Big Bill Thompson of Chicago, to wit: "Punch King George in the snoot." The target will be George V's great grandson, Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Britain. Stephen, the son of a second secretary of the U.S. embassy, was picked last week to be a sparring partner for five-year-old Prince Charles...
...fame rests as much on his draftsmanship as on his wit. The rule for cartoonists is to develop an instantly recognizable style, and stick to it. By ignoring this rule Steinberg has made himself the Picasso of the profession. He can enclose what he sees in a few simple lines, like bent coat hangers, or dissolve it into a haze of dots, a la Seurat. He draws on top of photographs, and occasionally draws imitation snapshots. He can and does mimic passports, old maps, and documents with ink drawings that look fairly convincing and 100% illegible. He will make...