Word: sham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...palace of the 16th Century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women . . . incompetent favorites . . . great men who are suddenly disgraced . . . insane extravagances . . . unexpected parsimony . . . enormous splendor, which is a sham . . . horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery . . . vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice . . . secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace...
While Secretary of State Stettinius insisted on giving the smaller power powers a chance to speak their respective pieces and ceremoniously went through the sham of listening to them, the Russians always maintained the truth of the Big Three position. Stettinius, Professor Sorokin indicated, let them talk but gave their opinions scant weight in plotting the ultimate decisions of the Big Three...
...gently experienced old lady replies, "O dear, it's a shame, isn't it? Who'll have another chocolate biscuit?" But it is in their worst failure that the men learn their best lesson. Deliberately "getting killed'' in order to loaf through a sham-battle, they already are soldiers enough to be ashamed...
...XRay. Sir Walter Scott, said Mark Twain, did "more real and lasting harm" with his "sham grandeurs" than "any other individual that ever wrote." Today, few Americans suspect how many thousands of native place names are directly or indirectly Sir Walter's. "Poetic" names built around glen, dale, vale, hurst, mere and burn broke out like a rash in the late 1800s; soon they enclosed many cities "like a ring of outer fortifications," protecting them from such vulgarisms as creek, gap, bottom and bluff. "Even if a city-dweller could escape moving to the suburbs [of Larchmont, Glen Cove...
Something for the Boys (20th Century Fox) turns out to have nothing very notable for anyone. Carmen Miranda replaces the stage version's Ethel Merman as the girl whose radioactive teeth help the soldier hero (Michael O'Shea) win a sham battle and a promotion; Mr. O'Shea and Vivian Elaine handle the love interest, and one of the Cole Porter songs, plus six fair-enough new non-Porter items. There are some pleasant essays in low-keyed Technicolor and sculptural cross-lighting in the dance numbers. Phil Silvers combines a daftly likable energy with some blurrily...