Word: putdowns
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...chance that it will turn into something that could be called a depression. One reason is psychological: as bad economic news persists, the word depression moves out of the twilight zone into public discussion, just possibly to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Administration's putdown of depression was prompted in part by a spate of articles in newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal that have discussed just such a possibility...
That familiar, glancing putdown may say a good deal about conventional-perhaps stereotypical-male attitudes toward pregnancy, but it also includes volumes of hand-me-down ideas about the traditional maternal look. To look pregnant is to look bowed in the middle, practically bulbous; to be pregnant is open physical defiance of prevailing fashion form. The usual course around these dire sartorial straits has been to sail into great billowing garments of soft prints that try to exalt maternity by sentimentalizing it. The expectant mother, shrouded in a calf-tickling Laura Ashley fantasy, becomes a late-Victorian artifact, like...
This sounds, on the surface, like the ultimate putdown, an undisguised request that Nicholson find a more suitable calling. But for Nicholson, it was a pat on the back. He had made a movie from his gut, and had obviously conveyed his inner self. Smoking grass, hysterical high school girls, and drifting heads are what make him tick. He only became an actor because, "all the chicks I liked were doing [theater]" in high school. And he only pursued it as a career because he despised school too much to follow up his high SATs. So the drifting head went...
There were two James McNeill Whistlers. One was the artist of the putdown. Oscar Wilde: "I wish I'd said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." The other was the artist of subtle landscapes and unprecedented arrangements of color and light. The wit was amply recorded in his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies...
...Chicago stands to lose one seat in Congress, several seats in the state legislature and up to $75 million in federal revenue sharing. More important, Chicago's civic pride would take a licking. Ever since A.J. Liebling, writing about Chicago in The New Yorker in 1952, coined the putdown Second City, Chicagoans have been perversely proud of it-all the more so when they could lay claim to the nation's tallest building (the Sears Tower), most durable big-city mayor (the late Richard Daley) and arguably the best symphony orchestra (under Conductor Sir Georg Solti...