Word: spattering
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...pilgrims of the spirit can avoid sounding cheaply pious or painfully oversincere. Dillard's literary salvation is tier sense of wonder and intensity. Sometimes she is ostentatious, as in her description of the Pacific coastline, "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." But at their best, Dillard's sentences have a clean, penetrating edge. "The higher Christian churches," she writes, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism. . . as though they knew what they were doing ... If God were to blast such a service to bits...
Leonard, Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks, who spatter their routines with Yiddish vulgarisms. Their stage bilingualism, Howe argues, spilled contempt on themselves for being inauthentic and disdained Gentiles for rewarding them...
...triteness is not the worst of Harry and Tonto's faults. Any film that aims at poignancy will spatter itself with bathos unless it is directed by a very skillful man indeed, and Mazursky is too heavy-handed to make it work. Harry and Tonto exploits old people and their problems for the sake of cheap tears and an occasional laugh. Too much of the movie's laughter is directed at Harry instead of against his tormentors. Harry seems ridiculous for urinating in the potted plant, not the police who arrest him. The only symptom of old age Harry displays...
...rush to rid itself of the weight of empire, Britain has often bestowed independence on lands that had no business accepting it. Botswana, for example, is an empty but now sovereign desert, Gambia a wriggle of jungle riverbank, and the Maldives a spatter of coral atolls mostly inhabited by starfish. Few lands, however, have been so ill-prepared to rule themselves as the Federation of South Arabia, which Britain announced last week will become independent by the end of November...
...More Roaring Metal. The Reading plant, says Roy Thompson, is a "cross between a laboratory and a hospital. No more of that hot, roaring metal. The typesetters wear ordinary clothes to work and don't spatter themselves with oil." The copy desk is just a few yards from twelve keyboard machines on which former linotypists type copy into the same sort of computer that some New York newspapers have vainly tried to install. The computer hyphenates and justifies lines to form even newspaper columns, thus eliminating one of the printers' biggest jobs...