Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Columnist William V. Shannon summed it up for the dissidents when he called Van Doren's testimony "a tasteless exercise in guile and unction. The basic problem seems to be his iron egotism. Can't we have a manly, straightforward admission of error without all this hokum about his 'responsibilities to my fellow men'? . . . I could not care less whether Charlie Van Doren made $10 or $129,000. But dignity, self-respect, restraint and detachment are civilized values that we should cherish. Van Doren affronted those values as much (before the subcommittee) as he ever...
Then last week a stranger came to town, Otto D. Standke by name, 5 ft. 7 in. tall, 71 years old, with hokum in his manner and magic in his bones. Starlings? There's a way to get rid of them. Step a little closer and we'll talk terms. Mount Vernon stepped a little closer, saw the shimmering words on the stranger's golden tie pin. He was, by self-proclamation, THE BIRD...
...book failed: the suspense turns not on Whether the scapegoat will reveal himself but on how he will handle himself in each situation. And moviegoers have the best of Author du Maurier's bestseller props: intrigue, murder, romance, another haunted Manderley setting, and a generous helping of hokum. As the author herself commented on her work: "This time I have gone the whole...
...thousand times." Why is he wearing a white suit? "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society." Wielding the satiric pinpoint that is sometimes more deadly than the sword, Twain proceeds to let the hot air out of do-gooders, religious humbugs and assorted hokum peddlers. To vary the pace, there are tall tales, a ghost story, an acted-out fragment from Huckleberry Finn. The humorist even prophesies his own death with the return of Halley's comet (1910): "The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they...
...McCoys, daguerreotypes of life on the farm, outrageously violate all soil-bank restrictions on hokum but provide some homely fun while they...