Word: bastardize
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...Baedekers; you don't have to obey their stars. Don't think of city festivals as fake tourist atmosphere; they are your chance to see revealed the collective subconscious of the population. Choose a restaurant in a working-class neighborhood; get yourself accepted there as "an unobtrusive bastard in a kindly family." Make love to a neighborhood girl. Don't be squeamish about using keyholes...
Then came a brand new question: Identify the contemporary ruler or political bigwig who is i) a shoemaker's son, 2) a baker's son, 3) a blacksmith's son, 4) a bastard's son. They got the first three in short order: Stalin, Daladier, Mussolini. For No. 4, Oscar Levant's candidate was Adolf Schickelgruber. A woman in the audience disagreed.* "Wasn't he, really?" queried Fadiman, glancing owlishly around. "Well," spake John Kieran, beating Fadiman to the evening's punch line, "he is, if he wasn...
...Dear Children may bumble on till after midnight. Once a fire engine sounded in the street. Sang out Barrymore: "I hope they get to the fire in time." Once he saw Ned Sparks in the audience. Walking to the footlights and pointing, Barrymore shouted: "There's that old bastard Ned Sparks." Once he couldn't hear the prompter in the wings, yelled: "Give those cues louder!" Once he said to the heroine: "I'll take you to ," couldn't remember "Lake Como...
...week (the Dallas News was paying him $55) and got it. But when he opened his first pay envelope in Boston he found $75. "There's been a mistake," Bill told his Sports Editor. "I'm only making $50." Said the Sports Editor: "Keep it, you dumb bastard-that's what you should have asked for in the first place." Bill kept it. He has never had to ask the Post for a raise...
...thinks he has found in science, David pulls out for London to live on his grand-patrimony while he studies biology. Strapped before his third year is out, David braves old Sir Thomas Danby, his father's father, who has had no notion of his existence. The bastard's ordeal turns into an idyll. He finds himself on the Riviera, with an allowance of a thousand pounds a year, chaperoned by a worldly-wise epigrammatist, soon in bed with an authentic beauty named Diana, to whom he writes verses. War talk is just a bore at first...