Back in 1928, Dr Arthur Cramp was bemoaning fat cures as "shrewd schemes for fooling the overweight", yet even today you can buy slimming hologram bracelets, tights that melt your fat with crystals and fat-burning lipstick.
"Arnold was supposed to be shrewd and nobody's fool, but also misguided; after learning his lessons, he was easily tamed and cuddled".
At the time Arnold struck audiences as an endlessly endearing trickster figure, whose Harlem-bred sensitivity to being hustled had been reduced to a sweetie-pie affectation: "What you talkin' about, Willis?" Arnold was supposed to be shrewd and nobody's fool, but also misguided; after learning his lessons, he was easily tamed and cuddled.
The point is not so much that the media has been fooled by shrewd marketers, but that this (legitimate) political discussion has generated consumer interest in a new product.
Grizzled, shrewd, easily mistaken for a fool but, in cases of conflict, loyal: this was Brennan's character, under Hawks, and it is curious to think what a permanent place it holds in the American idea of comradeship.
A remarkable set of plaster masks being shown for the first time ever, excavated from a shop in Pompeii (probably sales samples), have been identified as those of Atellan stock characters: Bucco, the ridiculous braggart; Maccus, the gluttonous rogue; Pappus, the old fool; Dossenus, the shrewd hunchback, and so on.
Never mind that she was the victim of a conman who fooled far shrewder financial minds; most commentators thought she was "greedy" for investing with Madoff and richly deserved her downfall.
His book is a shrewd self-portrait of a hero who cannot stop himself from becoming a fool — a fool who then seeks redemption by admitting his failures more loudly than a medieval flagellant in a public square.
Although some of the younger delegates found Franklin a sentimental old fool prone to feeble-minded irrelevance, he was shrewd beyond their understanding.
