Word: dumbness
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Pretty but dumb -- the old refrain of a guy beguiled by a woman's good looks, then crushed by her dullness. In these enlightened days, such japes are saved for Dan Quayle. But they could apply as well to a movie like POINT BREAK. No picture could be handsomer. The camera moves with bold, often devious assurance; action sequences are as sleekly muscled as the torsos of the film's jock hero (Keanu Reeves) and surfer villain (Patrick Swayze). Director Kathryn Bigelow has few peers at this aerobic cinema, as she proved a few years back with the weird, beautiful...
...Fortinbras, Daniel Jenkins enters talking in the clipped modern diction of a yuppie warrior -- contemptuous of doubt, confident of the power of confidence itself. Dumb luck makes him an epic hero. Every country his armies confront submits without battle. Then comes disaster just as abrupt and irrational: his soldiers all march into the Indus River and drown. The man of action, it turns out, is as storm tossed on the seas of fate as any man of thought -- and far less equipped to handle the swings of fortune. Any parallels to George Bush and the gulf war are obviously intentional...
...criticism is partly self-fulfilling. "The westerners tell us, 'You're dumb. You can't do anything right,' " says Jorg Richter, a psychologist in east Berlin. "That makes people emotionally ill." The sense of psychic distress is so widespread that politicians often use the language of clinical psychology to discuss Germany's problems. Zukunftsangst is fear of the future. Wendekrankheit -- turnabout sickness -- describes the general malaise that has accompanied the sharp dislocations associated with unification...
...Dick, wrote that a colt in rural Vermont, if it smells a fresh buffalo robe (the colt having no knowledge or experience of buffalo, which lived on the plains) will "start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrenzies of affright. Here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism of the world...
...quality of class as a whole." Do you really believe, Mr. Templeton, that Harvard should work to increase the fear of embarrassment in a section? Is that the environment most conducive to real learning? Perhaps students want a non-threatening environment where they are not afraid to ask dumb questions. Maybe students don't want to be in a section where everyone is fighting for his chance to impress the professor, thereby assuring a good letter of recommendation...