Word: show-off
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shrill? Maybe - though it's nothing compared to the lashing Royal gives Sarkozy, whom she variously describes as vulgar, avaricious and (gasp) boringly predictable. "His energy is impressive, but he really is a show-off," Royal says, claiming Sarkozy's quest for money and power leaves him looking ridiculous once he's attained it. "With his little sheriff's star and his plastic gun, his cowboy outfit, it's as if he had climbed up on the biggest horse in the merry-go-round and plucked down the prize...
...Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown and closes with Cole Porter's Be a Clown. Pierrot is your silent host; the calliope music announces that this is a three-ring circus of clowning around. And Madonna, once the Harlow harlot and now a perky harlequin, is the greatest show-off on earth...
...visage described discountenance." Eliot Spitzer wrote those words about a character in a short story for his high school literary magazine. The sentence was florid in an adolescent way - Spitzer was always something of an intellectual show-off. Jason Brown, a friend from those days, later told Spitzer biographer Brooke Masters that Spitzer might simply have written, "He was unhappy...
...anecdotal. The gravity of this material made me want to take myself out of it as much as possible. It felt like a distraction and it felt like anything that trivialized the material was inappropriate. So I concentrated on clarity. I really didn't want writing that was show-off or cutesy. I really poured my creative energies as a writer into the structure, and the sort of narrative flow of the argument and backing up the research...
...everybody loves a show-off, of course. Natalie Jeremijenko, assistant professor at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, says we should use robots to find creative solutions to the world around us rather than seeking a pleasing yap and wag at the push of a button. Working with teams of high school students, she tricks out toy robots - she calls them "feral robot dogs" - with all-terrain wheels and pollution sensors in their noses and sends them into landfills and industrial areas to search for toxins. These are robots with a social conscience. "Suddenly...