Word: wittingly
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...centrifugal force overcoming gravitation. Far from being a villain, he is the most entertaining and lovable of knaves. Caught out in his outrageous boasts, his fantastic lies, shamming dead (to avoid being killed) on the battlefield, he never loses his unshatterable aplomb, never lags in invention or languishes in wit. At bottom Falstaff may well be a superb showman, not expecting to be believed, only counting on being relished; not expecting to be acquitted, only certain of being pardoned. "He carves out his jokes," said Hazlitt, "as he would a capon or a haunch of venison, where there...
...uncut Hamlet, Margaret Webster's fine direction gives life and movement to a congested, multiform play. If the production has faults, they spring from excess of theatricality, not from taking Shakespeare too reverently. As Falstaff, Actor Evans has gusto and wit, though not quite enough of the knight's profound worldliness. And-perhaps surprisingly-he is better as the fat roisterer than he was as the melancholy Dane...
Sitting on a piano at a party for Loyalist Spain in Washington, famed Writer & Wit Dorothy Parker nervously swore off humor: "I don't see how you can help being unhappy now. The humorist has never been happy, anyhow. Today he's whistling past worse graveyards to worse tunes. . . . If you had seen what I saw in Spain, you'd be serious too. And you'd be up on this piano, trying to help those people...
...schoolboy of 14 now knows, Macaulay's genius was considerably overrated. His phenomenal, encyclopedic memory was too often a substitute for thinking. His wit borrowed its main punch from his universal spleen and political bias. (Said Macaulay, who loved only his sisters: "There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner.") Most of the writers and poets he demolished-Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, Gibbon,. Wordsworth, Tom Paine, Herman Melville, to name only a few- have long survived him. And his History, while still exciting for its colorful narrative, is not noted for its accuracy...
...Christ, but it hain't." He never whimpered, not even when his old man laid him cold, and he was first of the gang to find out about sex at first hand. Such accomplishments and wisdom ranked high with his followers: Wickie Winters, scabby-faced, half-dressed, half-wit son of a washerwoman; Cockie Werner, whose only talent was catching frogs; Nutsie Doane, also ordinary, except for a crooked arm, the result of having a broken arm re-broken by his drunken...