Word: dumbness
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Born Yesterday brings Brock to Washington, where he has bought a Senator, to try to grab off junk yards all over the postwar world. He installs himself, his henchman and his dumb blonde mistress in a fantastic $235-a-day hotel suite. Since there will be forays into official Washington society, he decides that the blonde had better get educated. His choice of a teacher is a crusading young writer on the New Republic. From there on everything in the play is predictable, but piquant. The young woman, who defines peninsula as "that new medicine," is soon taught words like...
...free corn to anyone attending its classes. A special stamp issue was put out to help pay for 4,000,000 Government-issued primers. One illiterate old Indian chief solemnly promised Minister Bodet to make the people of his village literate even if he had to kill off the dumb ones...
...pulling letters, you can give the clients the lovey-dovey stuff or you can give 'em the old one-two. Red Lewis gives 'em the old one-two. So they give him $500,000. That's just sound business practice. Maybe Lewis wasn't so dumb after all. He certainly knew where the duck was going to fall...
...there has always been in China the "squeeze" system, which we consider graft, but they do not. Any Chinese who handles a transaction for you takes 10%. If he takes 20%, he is dishonest; but, if he does not take 10%, he is not considered honest, he is just dumb. The Chinese say that dishonesty consists in leaving somebody with the wrong impression. So it is not graft from the Chinese point of view, because everybody knows perfectly well it is being done. It is "old custom," has always been done, and everybody understands...
Between the extremes of sullen impenitence and dumb docility, some German civilians seemed to want to make sense...