Word: wisecracks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to poetry. At first even many scientists didn't really grasp relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack (asked if it was true that only three people understood relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, then said, "I am trying to think who the third person is"). To the world at large, relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived reality. And for many advanced thinkers of the 1920s, from Dadaists to Cubists to Freudians, that was a fitting credo, reflecting what...
When does flirting become a real problem? Ask MeShelle Locke, 16, of Lacey, Wash. On Nov. 5, she was kidding around with a boy in English class at North Thurston High. He made some wisecrack to the teacher, and Locke looked at him, made a gun with her thumb and index finger, and said, "Bang." The boy, whom she often joked with, wondered if it was a threat. "No," MeShelle said lightly, "it's a promise...
...small one. After a promising first scene, she is largely banished to nursing a beer on the side of the stage. O'Connor gives her only enough dialogue about her intriguing romantic troubles to tantalize, and Nugent's prodigious talent is expressed almost entirely by the occasional wisecrack and by baleful glances smoldering with reproach directed toward her brother and sister...
While he and Mengers are now friends, Dunne attributes his downfall partly to a wisecrack he made about her and her husband. "I was blackballed after that," he remembers. "It was hilarious at the time." (He won't repeat it.) Mengers counters that she doesn't even know what the remark was. "How can you blackball a producer? It's ridiculous," she says. "You can't tell a star or director what to do. I wish I had had that kind of power. He uses it as a convenient excuse." Asked if people gloated over Dunne's fall, Mengers says...
...disjunction between the private and public Gores stymies his friends, frustrates his advisers and puzzles the press. To one degree or another, all politicians suffer from it, of course. For most of their waking hours they have learned to smother their natural impulses, lest the videotape capture some untoward wisecrack or a flirtatious glance. They know the landscape of American politics is littered with the carcasses of colleagues who tried, with disastrous results, to be a normal human being...