Word: americana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...CHARLES M. RUSSELL BOOK, by Harold McCracken. A fine serving of Americana. Next to Frederic Remington, "Kid" Russell was the most popular artist of the U.S. West. His pictures quivered with action, spoke with the light and loneliness of the wide open spaces he learned to love as a cowboy. Nearly 200 illustrations, 35 in color, together with a readable, sympathetic biography...
Kerouac's use of pure Americana makes his language an effective vehicle at times. But it becomes merely amusing when he borrows from advertisements (A piece of apple pie is "nutritious, and ... delicious"), and elsewhere downright sickeningly romantic. ("Holy flowers floating in the dawn of Jazz America.") And when he tries to describe jazz, he reaches the heights of the ridiculous. ("ta-tup-EE-da-de-deraRup ...") It's difficult to see why, in the day of LP's, he thinks it necessary to compete with Charlie Parker on paper...
Since historians and humanities professors agree that the vitality of language reflects the vitality of culture, it is in semantics that PR makes its real contribution to Americana...
...eight years. Revlon claims that its paints (Persian Melon, Fire and Ice, Say It With Rubies) and powders (Love Pat, Touch and Glow) adorn the faces of more U.S. women than those of any other maker. Its TV programs ($64,000 Question and $64,000 Challenge) have become contemporary Americana. But all the while Charlie Revson, who will spend $16 million on advertising this year, feuded bitterly with the admen and used nine separate agencies in 13 years. Few other advertisers can make that claim...
Nothing is funnier to practical Americans than a gadget that seems almost too practical to bear. Like the first model T, the Murphy In-A-Dor bed. which folded up into a closet, was laughed into fame, and so into the annals of genuine Americana. Millions who never owned a Murphy bed had seen Charlie Chaplin wrestling vainly with the contraption in One A.M., roared with glee when it finally flipped him into the closet. William L. Murphy, who invented the bed in the early 1900s, stoutly insisted that no such outrage ever happened in real life. But sales soared...