Word: wordplay
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Clinton does not seem to mind. Scarier still, he does not seem to notice. He seems to really believe that his tortured legalisms, his artful dodges, his facile wordplay, his resort to idiosyncratic definitions that recall nothing so much as the "private language" of some autistic children, constitute an authentic escape from falsehood. It makes you wonder whether what appears to be Clinton's cynicism is instead a cognitive deficit, that he has by now and by habit lost all recognition of the difference between truth and lies...
...father used to fight about his chosen occupation--J.D. wanted him to be a naval officer. "By the time he was diagnosed," he says, "we'd made our peace." In 1996 he wrote one of his finest songs, False Echoes, about J.D., a sober lyric without fancy wordplay about a man who "fades like a flare...
...multiple narrative voices and extravagant wordplay made Ulysses a virtual thesaurus of styles for writers wrestling with the problem of rendering contemporary life. Aspects of Joyce's accomplishment in Ulysses can be seen in the works of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, all of whom, unlike Joyce, won the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...dozen new pickup lines, each with presidential cachet. "You make my knees knock." "I like your curves"--or, alternatively, "I like the way the hair falls down your back." And when all else fails: "Kiss it." Lawyers of the future will know to reach at once for the trademark wordplay of Robert Bennett, growling at plaintiffs, "This is tabloid trash with a legal caption." Even our knowledge of medicine has deepened. Everyone now knows that Peyronie isn't an Italian luncheon meat...
...plodding it never comes close to evoking emotion in the listener--unless you consider boredom an emotion. As for the next cut, River of Tears, it has a central metaphorical construction so lazy that one half expects the next track to be titled Needle in a Haystack. Simple, direct wordplay can work if the lyrics hit upon something primal and urgent. River of Tears, however, merely drifts away, ineffectual and insubstantial...