Word: banter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...creating his determinedly unromantic lovers, Shakespeare as a comedy writer traded sighs for banter, nightingales for mockingbirds, antic humor for elegant wit. Benedick's first sniffy words to Beatrice-"What, my dear Lady Disdain-are you yet alive?"-could drop straight out of Congreve. As for their wearing their hearts on their fingernails, it is a truism that the pair of them-he all scorn for marriage, she all scorn for men-are so antagonistic for being so much alike. Fortunately, the dullards around them dream up one bright idea: they contrive that an eavesdropping Benedick shall hear that...
Tireless Name-Dropper Elsa Maxwell, reporting for the Hearstpapers her latest encounters with the well-known, recorded some brief banter with a sly curmudgeon of old. "I once asked Bernard Shaw which was his favorite Shakespearean comedy," wrote Elsa, "and he replied. 'Othello.' 'But Othello is not a comedy,' I told him. 'It's a tragedy.' Mr. Shaw quipped, 'Any play whose plot hangs on a lady's handkerchief must be a comedy...
Miss Ryder, though history will remember her as the girl with the aquamarine eyelids, is better. She has the appropriate freshness of face and figure, except for the eyelids, and is good at times; like Kulukundis, she is better at remonstrance than banter. But there came a time when her voice recalled the sound a tape recorder makes when played backwards at a high speed; fresh, perhaps, but unsettling...
...boys arrive and leave slightly before children in nearby schools, are escorted to subways by a teacher, who pays for their rides out of public funds. Both schools require neat dress; the Brooklyn unit even insists on ties. In the classroom, the boys usually keep up a cocky, running banter with their teacher. But they can talk with the weariness of old age about their problems. "I'm a troublemaker," said one eighth grader. "I started everything that ever happened...
...play uses a classic stage form, the brittle conversation piece. In terms of smart brushes and insulting banter, this has its good points; but seldom were a classic action and a classic method so mismated. 'Stage struggles over a will make for melodrama or serious drama, farce or sardonic comedy, for banged fists, shaking fingers or skinny claws-but not for the playfully brandished rapier. Fencing verbally, the brothers sometimes neatly pink each other, even achieve an occasional moral louche. But they use buttoned foils on synthetic flesh. Nor, in place of human drama, is there any real psychological...