June 2020
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When I was a boy in the 1940s and '50s, I was — yearly or semi-yearly — hauled off to gatherings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle. "Chafetz" was the maiden name of my maternal grandmother, Sonia Green. "E" and "L" were Sonia's parents, but the names that the initials abbreviated are gone…
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I'm detecting oxymorons in everything I read. Perhaps I'm even imagining them. Love's Labour's Lost is a "great feast of languages" and also a savory banquet of rhetorical figures. Here are some of the oxymorons (or "cross-couplers," as Puttenham called them) that I came upon in my latest re-reading of the play. Some require explanation.…
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Pitfall is just shy of sensational. Error and evil intrude into a normal postwar American suburban family. Jay Dratler and Andre de Toth, writer and director, hit all the necessary film noir notes but without descending to cliche. The beautiful blonde, is, for once, neither a temptress nor a gold-digger, but a decent, troubled young…
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The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz." But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in…
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I don't know much about economics and never did –it's an area of knowledge that has lived up to its reputation as a dismal, arcane science. It's not only economics — I don't even understand money, which has become more ethereal and symbolic during the course of my lifetime. In my first real job, at…
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Famous literary doppelgangers include Mr. Hyde, William Wilson, the picture in Dorian Grey's attic, Leggatt, and Golyadkin Jr. In film, there are the sisters, or twins, Kate and Patricia Bosworth, both played by Bette Davis and no doubt many more that I don't know or remember that professional movie historians could add. Doubles abound in…