(Behan eventually married another woman in 1955.) Both the screenplay and Mr. Hatosy's performance play down Brendan's commitment to the Irish Republican Army, to the degree that his repeated insistence that he is a political prisoner sounds more like a rote response than an impassioned declaration.
Dr Herbert Terrace, a psychology professor at Columbia University famous for his language experiments in the 1970s with a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky, is on record as saying that Alex was making a "rote response".
This was the "Death Wish" scenario unvarnished, and Mr. Dukakis's inability to grapple with it forcefully (he licked his lips and droned his way through a rote response about prison reform) was regarded by many as a failure of sheer manliness.
As Mr. Obama recited a gracious rote response, "She was my friend before this contest started, she's going to be my friend after this contest started — after this contest ends," Ms. Goldberg looked away and fiddled with her hair, and Ms. Walters stared down at her lap, unable to suppress a smile that, loosely translated, signaled, "Yes, and I am Marie of Romania".
His aim, it seems, is to control and standardize aesthetic experience, forcing viewers into a, yes, infantile mold of rote response.
Trump announced that he would visit Las Vegas on Wednesday, after he returns from Puerto Rico, but, aside from the investigation itself, the only substantive response from the federal government that Trump offered was to direct that American flags be flown half-staff, another rote response after a mass shooting.
Let's start with Jindal, who delivered his now-infamous, numbingly rote response to Obama's national address in a kindergarten cadence.
Dell executives are no doubt very tired of answering the AMD question; in fact, all must have been trained to deliver the same rote response for the past decade.
But, looking back on that moment, I can't help but be disturbed by my rote response.
Deadly shootings in schools — that is, the killing of children in sanctuaries of learning — have become a distinctly American ritual, the rote responses as familiar as a kindergarten recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
He had represented Newtown as a congressman and had often given rote responses to questions on gun control before the shooting took place.
