Word: familiar
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Father and Son (Columbia). Psychologists and the writers of fairy stories agree that the relationship between children and their stepmothers is apt to be complicated. The word "stepmother" itself implies so familiar and important a dramatic situation that it is hard to understand how even the most garbled reproduction of it could be wholly untrue. Only by ignoring his real material in favor of claptrap borrowed from other pictures has Director Erie Kenton been able to remove all traces of reality from this story which is told in gasps of silence and badly recorded, preposterously written dialog...
Playwright Francis de Croisset, a familiar figure in the U. S.-haunted Ritz bar, tried an epigram: "For women an idea always has a face...
...average abridged dictionary. The attempt to recover the idiom of another age so deliberate that the writer cannot have realized the many-times repeated truth that the Elizabethtn poets were not works with "thees" and "dosts" and "wilts." Among their contemporaries the words were in good and familiar usage, and a writer three hundred years later is not justified in using them in preference to the language of his own times...
...Familiar is the story of the Van Sweringen brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James. Once they sold newspapers, and then they sold real estate, and now they have shifted to the buying side of merchandising and make railroads their specialty. Oris P. is 50, Mantis J. is 47; they are both bachelors; and, though some observers maintain that Oris P. is the Planner and Mantis J. is the Doer, they pride themselves upon being equal in all things and to share all things?even a reputed fraternal check book?in common...
Somehow there seems to be something wrong with attributing Harvard's "greatness" to a preoccupation with sartorial expertness and a will to "belong". Most of the current criticism in regard to this institution centers around its familiar indifference to the press of the trousers or the shine on the shoes. It is true that a large number of men do shave daily but it is hardly to this that they owe the remarkable front which has apparently enabled them to get away with murder for the past three hundred years. To become really serious about the matter, however...