Word: understandables
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...Miss Jane Cowl, I understand, has praised 'Desire Under the Elms.' She declares it to be a great play, and that it teaches a great moral lesson. You know the plot, I suppose. That plot is typical--all too typical of the sort of thing that is being exploited in New York. Producers insist on neurotic plays, plays that means something. The public or a very definite part of it, supports them...
When Robert Browning published his famed poem, The Ring and the Book, few could at first reading understand it. Many considered this insulting until one critic pointed out that the poem was, for its very difficulty, the most magnificent compliment that had ever been paid to the intelligence of the British public...
...associates here, have never subscribed to the view that bad taste is any the less offensive because it is metropolitan taste. To me, urbanity is the ability to offend without being offensive, to startle composure and to deride without ribaldry. The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity. They were quite correct, however, in their original assertion. The New Yorker is not for the old lady in Dubuque...
...Public wanted the Bronx editors to do. The editors sat in consultation. One man's version of the last line of a limerick was as good as another's, they feared. They were no Brownings. "We can give them words to rhyme," said one editor. "But they won't understand what they mean," dissented another. "Then we will tell them what they mean," cried the first. "They can read English, can't they...
...supper in the Savoy Hotel, London, at which Loie Fuller, dancer, and Mme. Yvette Guilbert performed for him as if he were royalty. Where another would thump his chest in robust braggadocio, he speaks with a sly wink and a deprecating gesture, for he wants the reader to understand that Corbett was a prize-fighter who wore a gardenia in his buttonhole...