Word: atrox
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...White had written, old-style, that the snake will follow the movement of the gun-muzzle so closely with its head that you cannot fail to hit the snake's head when you pull the trigger. Texan Howe experimented, fired many a shot at many a Crotalus adamanteus atrox, missed their heads again and again, then angrily wrote: "It is such bunk as this that is making the development of common sense in this country slow...
...they purport to be "fine writing." We know, as all writers (and especially journalists) know, that these words are overworked and unavoidably so, but to stigmatize them as "atrociously bad" is idiotic. Mr. Dowse has evidently not studied etymology or he would know that the word "atrocious" (Latin atrox, "fierce," "truculent") cannot be suitably applied in this connection. Again, he alludes, in a badly jumbled and incoherent sentence, to "the full clutch of circumstance." Apparently he is groping after a line from William Ernest Henley, whom, however, he has evidently not read. I recommend him to study Pope...
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