Wu clapped his hand over my mouth and daftly said nothing himself.

Spielin' daftly up Cave Hill.

And not funny in a chin-strokey, critically adored, smart-alecky way, but properly, daftly, snort-inducingly funny.

However he also criticised the denouement of the episode for being "daftly mawkish" and opined that "it's always impossible to care about CGI characters".

Which wouldn't be a problem, except that Hollis isn't a daftly narcissistic man-monster, he is a gently troubled and immature misanthrope with a humorous urge to self-destruct.

All the while, Pamela Payton-Wright (Mrs. Tarleton) daftly indignant or otherwise distracted, prattles on about this and that.

"She had an East-West thing going," Mr. LaDuca recalled of Bjork's Western-style jacket, which paired somewhat daftly with an Oriental-looking skirt.

Friends either sigh and look at me as a slightly cranky little eco-fundamentalist whose hairshirt, yogurt-weaving notions of green self-sacrifice have led to this daftly complicated and rather inconvenient world mission.

The film's appeal, along with what you might call its moral, lies in the close fit between Mr. Hillenburg's brightly colored, daftly inventive approach to animation and storytelling and the buoyant, grating good cheer of his hero.

That children are more free than adults seems extremely self-evident; that a man whose young son has been killed by "kids" driving a car should see childhood as a dreamy time of freedom turns Hollis from a wistful man-boy into a daftly narcissistic man-monster.