Word: merriment
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this time, things have gotten pretty much out of control in the audience, anyway. Numerous bottles of bubbly have been carried into the house after the intermission, and there is much merriment Behind me, a sloshed woman loudly asks her escort to explain a pun "What's that mean--penis?" At one poirt, cries of "Freshman Mixer" and "Buzz Aldren!" go up. In the center section, guest-of-honor Steven Spielberg, the Pudding's newly crowned Man of year, looks mildly bewildered. E.T., after all never had too deal with alumni...
Safire, however, is convinced that "the breaking of the President is merrily under way." So often critical of Reagan, he should know better: there really seems little merriment or triumph in the press criticism...
...contents-38 fictions-range back to Leo Tolstoy's The Three Hermits, whose pious innocents forget a prayer and run on top of the ocean to find their condescending teacher. The most recent are powerful condensations of modern life by Heinrich Boll, who describes a professional laugher producing merriment on cue for everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other master miniaturists show that brevity can be not merely...
There was at first a certain shivery merriment, a sense of shared rigor. "For a few hours," E.B. White once wrote of extreme cold's onset, "all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive." But as the cold settled in, White's "clear and congenial task" proved too much for some of the frail and the elderly, for luckless travelers exposed for too long a time to the bite of winter. By week's end more than 230 people had died, victims of hypothermia (low body...
...line in that processional,/ Step into that small confessional,/ There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original." There was a time (circa 1955) when The Vatican Rag caused frissons and merriment all around the campus- circuit. Songwriter Tom Lehrer was a Harvard math professor who could do numbers on anything from sex to the Bomb. But satire is a parasitical art, no stronger than its host. Folk singers, the. military, Freud and faith, all have been familiar targets for over a generation. Today Tomfoolery, a chrestomathy of 28 Lehrer hits...