Word: downrightness
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When Lerner decides to be original, his changes are always vulgar, simplistic, or downright perverse. The killing of Quilty doesn't take place in an eerie, Poe-like mansion, but at a party in Arizona in front of Quilty's freaky set of disciples, thus giving Lerner a chance for a rousing song-and-dance opening. The Enchanted Hunters Motel where Lolita seduces Humbert is changed to the Bed-D-Bv Motel, full of whores and Mr. and Mrs. John Smiths. And Lerner perversely places Humbert's final visit with the married, pregnant Lolita at the very end, enabling...
...disease, perhaps semantic aphasia will do. Semantic aphasia is that numbness of ear, mind and heart-that tone deafness to the very meaning of language-which results from the habitual and prolonged abuse of words. As an isolated phenomenon, it can be amusing if not downright irritating. But when it becomes epidemic, it signals a disastrous decline in the skills of communication, to that mumbling low point where language does almost the opposite of what it was created for. With frightening perversity-the evidence mounts daily-words now seem to cut off and isolate, to cause more misunderstandings than they...
...these and other war critics was a column by Joseph Alsop praising Richard Nixon's "cool courage" in making the "lonely decision" to invade Laos. Alsop, a consistent advocate of strong U.S. military action in Indochina, declared: "Senator Fulbright and many of his colleagues, in turn, are downright eager to be proved right by an American defeat in war, and will loathe being proved wrong by U.S. success in Southeast Asia...
...Catonsville Nine at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, I was one of many actors who finally found a "prophet." Daniel was still underground at the time of the presentation last summer, and the FBI harassment we as actors were forced to bear was perhaps ridiculous, if not downright unbelievable...
...meantime, the White House has sent over 600 editorial writers a Joseph Alsop newspaper column charging that Fulbright is "downright eager" for the Laotian operation to fail because it would prove he is right in opposing the action...