Word: drollness
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...will not invite the annoying people in my class back for the reunions. You know that weasely guy in your Ec 10 section who kept interrupting the section leader to regale everyone with his oh-so-droll anecdotes about the Bolivian economy? After you graduate, you'll never see him again...
...ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolts and therefore pile up as many of you apiece as we can get--this is what too many of you seem to forget. "Coleridge may be said...
...ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough. But by the dozen? This, the quantitative aspect of grading--we are, after all, getting $5 a head for you dolls and therefore pile up as many of you a piece as we can get--this is what too many of you seem to forget. "Coleridge may be said...
Touche, Ivan. But the argument is worth following one more step. Gorbachev has infinitely greater might on his side than Lincoln did in the Civil War, but considerably less right. And he knows it. Unlike Lincoln, Gorbachev has already conceded secession in principle. His ever droll spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, talks about divorce. By setting a price on its property in Lithuania, Moscow has opened negotiations on alimony...
American economists are writers of humorous fiction, as the U.S.-budget fantasies attest, but John Kenneth Galbraith's droll, mannered novels are funny on purpose. In his first, The McLandress Dimension (1963), the Harvard professor introduced a concept that measured the time -- often a matter of milliseconds -- that public figures spend thinking of matters unrelated to themselves. The new novel, his third, explores the equally valuable IRAT, or Index of Irrational Expectations, a quantification of the collective wrongheadedness of the stock market. Harvard technocrat Montgomery Marvin, known for his seminal study of refrigerator pricing, invents IRAT and becomes exceedingly rich...