Word: uncouth
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Other epithets, many not so complimentary, play on proper names. To Hoover is to inhale or consume greedily; Ike is an uncouth fellow; LBJ, the military's Long Binh jail in Vietnam; Jerusalem Slim, the radical syndicalists' derisive name for Jesus; Oscar, an unpleasant or foolish man. Joe gets more than three pages of entries, among them Joe Lunchpail, an ordinary working man, and Joe Sad, black English for a friendless or unpopular man. John Wayne wins nine citations. To John-Wayne is to attack with great force; a John Wayne cookie is a military field-ration biscuit...
...moment right before the play in which an employee from the theater comes on stage and informs audience members on how to become members of the Huntington "subscriber family," rattling off a series of prices, discounts and package deals. The infomercial aspect of this interlude is uncouth, and both the Huntington representative and the audience are made uncomfortable...
Cezanne was, from that point on, a great portraitist, one of the best the world has seen, especially of himself. His self-portraits invite comparison with those of Rembrandt, and the best of them justify it. He begins, in his own images, as a wild man, a solitary, an uncouth glaring peasant with greasy hair massed on either side of the pale dome of a bald head; he ends, in his last years, as a kind of sage. Between the extremes is a painting like the Self-Portrait (Portrait of the Artist with a Rose Background), with its powerfully modeled...
...flip side is to denigrate what we have, a variation on Groucho Marx's refusal to belong to any club with such low standards that it would have him for a member. Abraham Lincoln in 1860 entered polite America's imagination cartooned as an ungainly ape, an uncouth backwoods savage. In the 1932 election campaign, even some liberals appraised Franklin Roosevelt as a feckless mama's boy from the silver-spoon Hudson River gentry, a man without character or principles. "An amiable Boy Scout," wrote Walter Lippman...
...attention bemuse the traditional gardeners, those lifelong devotees for whom the hobby is a necessity, not a luxury. "They would garden," observes Allen Lacy, who has been writing about the original tribe for years, "even if everyone else considered that gardening was a sign of a diseased mind and uncouth habits." Yet Lacy is convinced that whatever motive draws gardeners in, whether vanity or foolishness or the need to bury their treasure in the ground, the actual experience outdoors will come to exert its own pull. "I know nobody who has given it up, except for reasons of infirmity, advancing...