The Music Man
z In the Broadway hit The Music Man, “Professor” Harold Hill
attempts to convince the people of a town in Iowa that their sons are
in desperate need of a boys’ band. By exaggerating the pernicious
evils of playing pool, which he says leads boys into licentious,
avaricious, and salacious activities, Hill talks parents into buying
expensive instruments and uniforms.
z His plan, though, is to skip town the moment the goods arrive,
going back on his promise to instruct the boys on how to play. In
the meantime, Hill teaches his students a factitious performance
method called the Think System, in which they are simply to
imagine that they know how to play. Along the way, he meets
Marion the librarian, and his scam is thwarted when he falls in love.z Of course, Professor Harold Hill is a paragon of one of the target
nouns we’ve looked at: a mountebank.James Joyce
z The early-20th-century Irish author James Joyce serves to illustrate
the differences among three words we’ve already discussed: erudite,
recondite, and abstruse. These words are all related, but they connote
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called Dubliners, and he followed it up in 1916 with the novel A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
ż Each of the stories in Dubliners hinges on what Joyce called an
“epiphany,” a moment in which the main character arrives at a
life-changing realization.ż In A Portrait of the Artist, a semiautobiographical account of
his own experiences at a Jesuit school, Joyce developed his
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abandon both Catholicism and Ireland itself.