Word: comically
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...press dispatches from the Riff should never bore anyone. The American soldiers of fortune with the French forces ignore the state departments' august disapproval and proceed to the day's fighting like bad boys playing truant. Unreasonable obstinacy displayed by the Riffians in refusing to be intimidated by the comic opera Spanish army precipitates a political crisis in Madrid. A French officer, perhaps a distant relative of General Nicholas Herkimer, directs his command from a stretcher for eleven days after being shot through both hips. The underdogs in the fight are lean, brown men who live in the desert...
...that would have delighted his learned and loquacious hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson. His discourse upon the typographical history of the Bible is no more pedantic than his bubbling monolog on Gilbert and Sullivan (in which it occurs to him that "we get lots of our ideas of government from comic operas and then take ourselves as seriously as Sitting Bull"). From "The Ghost of Gough Street" and "Shakespeare and the Old Vic" one gets a faintly disturbing impression of anglomania, soon dispelled by the mordant judgments of "Are Comparisons Odious?" (on English lecturers and tailors, French politeness and libraries, American...
Creators of comic strips have done much with the Sunday Night idea; what could be better material? Papa in his stocking feet; Mama in a temper; horrible noises rising around from huge-mouthed canary birds, thrown vases, dying pet; "Awk," "Tweet-Tweet," "Glub-Glub," "Plunk," "Zowie...
Last week A. Atwater Kent, manufacturer of radio apparatus, proposed to substitute for the comic stripper's idea of Sunday night another vision-that of a smiling Mama, Papa, infant, listening to the sounds that issue from an Atwater Kent radio. And the sounds, too, would be different. In place of the comic stripper's unnamable babble, would ring the voices of Louise Homer, Anna Case, Edward Johnson, Mabel Garrison, Reinald Werrenrath, Frieda Hempel, the instruments of Toscha Seidel, Mischa Levitzki, the New York State Symphony Orchestra. These artists have already been engaged. Mr. Kent will pay them...
...cheering to encounter such positive evidence of the fact that the ancient aristocracy of "cusswords" is at last emerging from dark corners and being received publicly. Time was when all the stage knew was the use of the least harmful of all emphatic monosyllables solely for comic purposes. Writers like Mr. George Moore who perpetually deplore how foreign words and phrases are emasculating the English language, should be pleased to witness this reestablishment of words the lineage of which is as purely Anglo Saxon as that of any in the language...