With the screenwriter Chris Terrio (also a Globe nominee), Mr. Affleck also has coined a catchphrase – one that is not suitable for print or, he lamented, for the movie's poster.
He lamented, for instance, the criticisms that had been aimed at his Secretary of State, John Kerry, for failing in his earlier attempts to put a ceasefire in place (one the details of which Israel had found appalling).
He lamented, for example, California's enactment of tens of thousands of laws during his 45 years in politics.
In his influential book, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002), he lamented: "For too long, the pages of history have been stained by bloodshed in the name of God".
"I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments," he laments in "Requiem for the Spanish Dead": The unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives, Lowered into the graves with the red flags over them.... Alone on a hilltop in San Francisco suddenly I am caught in a nightmare, the dead flesh Mounting over half the world presses against me.
Something all too rare, he laments, amid bustling queues for popular art works.
"Too bad we don't have enough information to say for sure it was a love bite," he laments, "because that would make for some really sexy paleontology".
For example, he laments that Salman Rushdie—"a novelist who I believe ought to have known better"—succumbs to Twitter.
An accomplished linguist who speaks seven languages, including Russian and Arabic, and taught himself Serbian for fun, he laments that he is not entitled to carry a gun on the job or to make arrests.
As a former middle-school science teacher, I feel Robert Ricken's pain as he laments the testing for standards in middle schools ["The Death Knoll of Middle School," April 16].
He laments the need for discussion of such distasteful matters, then adds a smirking commercial aside: 'This is the chapter that will be serialised first.' In return for the confidences of these hoity-toity ladies, he advertises their money-making enterprises.
