Word: acridity
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...saved by what Edmund Wilson calls Mencken's genial and acrid relish for the flavor of American life. Even more helpful are the odd anecdotes scattered through it, possessing the sort of owlish, stubborn humor that comes from wringing a subject dry and then wringing it some more. "In late years," says Mencken, "it is me has even got support from eminent statesmen. When, just before Roosevelt II's inauguration day in 1933, the first New Deal martyr, the Hon. Anton J. Cermak, was shot ... he turned to Roosevelt and said, 'I'm glad...
...Justus Kleberg Jr. (pronounced Clayberg) was riding a range as fabled as Pecos Bill's. The liege lord of all the King ranches and all the King ranchers was winding up the great fall roundup on his many pastures. With his hard-riding vaqueros, amid the dust and acrid smell of burning flesh, Bob Kleberg threaded his horse in & out of the milling hundreds of cherry-red cows and their calves. Lean-faced, gimlet-eyed, with the brim of his Stetson hat upswept in King Ranch fashion, Bob Kleberg told his vaqueros with swift gestures and quick Spanish phrases...
There are moments when panels of the Paris of 1921 are briefly and brilliantly lighted up-fashionable house parties where the company is picked to create tensions, the conversation is acrid and infidelities are always in the making; arty gatherings and cafe parties which recall the days when Aragon was the darling of the Dadaists, days of his early prose poem: "The salmon sheen of silk stockings at the hour when cities are aflame. . . ." But readers who remember Aragon's ruthless, panoramic novels of prewar France (Residential Quarter, The Century Was Voting) will find none of the old satirical...
...Lynch became a hard-drinking news photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the acrid era of flash powder, singed eyelashes and burning lace curtains. "You could always tell a photographer," he recalls. "One hand would be bound in picric acid gauze, and his eyebrows would be burned off." You could tell Slim Lynch by a shapeless cap, a tired-looking overcoat, a cynical stare. He sharpened his camera eye on such famed stories as the Weyerhaeuser kidnaping-and hardened his stomach on raids on rural stills (the newsmen usually split the "take" with the dry squad...
...patchwork quilt. The new post-war model is smoother and more continuous. When not given to abandoned flights of the imagination and on tunes which are not so fast and gusty that they shake the instrumentalists out of all their ideas before the record is half through, Freeman's acrid, trembling tone and curious phrasing can, as in this case, produce tasteful and distinctive music...