Word: balaam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Like Balaam, the leader hadn't started out that way. A fortnight ago, Rival Editor Cummings had given the Beaverbrook press a resounding thwack. "The Daily Express," he wrote in his News Chronicle column, "seems to have the British Empire on the brain ... It opposes Marshall aid and Western Union as policies inimical to the Empire [and] keeps up its dreary drip of criticism unfortified by any rational alternatives...
...eyebrows of newspaper editors, the greatest pedants going, shot up. It was, said the New York Times stiffly, a "remarkable sentence." But college professors, quickly appealed to, proved as disappointing as Balaam. To a man, they put their O.K. on Churchill's grammar-defying "This is me" (a usage that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, has already admitted to "conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English"). Said Yale's Robert D. French: men like Churchill make the English language. Seconded Princeton's Gordon H. Gerould: idiomatic English is good speech, prissy English...