Word: bathe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Beau" Nash, a sort of combination of Elsa Maxwell and Ward McAllister in his day, "made" Bath. In 1705 he found the town squalid and cramped, the famous mineral baths (started by the Romans) badly run. Worst of all, there was no place for the fashionable to dance except the bowling green, and it was frequented by swaggering armed swells who unsheathed their swords at the slightest affront to honor...
...balls and assemblies in a stately new hall, laid down and enforced a code of manners (sword-wearing and smoking in front of ladies were banned), ordered all the old ladies to sit in the back rows and all the shyest maidens to dance. The plump, dandiacal "King of Bath," whose crown was an enormous cream-colored beaver hat, ruled society like an autocrat.* Graceful new Georgian buildings transformed Bath into the handsomest of English towns...
Britain's literary great flocked to Bath. So did every social climber. Eighteenth Century Author Tobias Smollett, for one, sometimes looked with bilious eye at "what is called the fashionable company at Bath . . .† The number of people, and the number of houses continue to increase; and this will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistible torrent of folly and extravagance shall either be exhausted or turned into other channels, by incidents and events which I do not pretend to foresee...
...regurgitated by mastodons." Italian squalor was worsened by the morbid excitement it seemed to arouse in visiting foreigners, who, perhaps "a little stifled by ... civilization . . . when they saw a [place] that had been smashed into temporary primitiveness" felt an animal instinct "to leap into it, as though into a bath...
...London, Lord Mancroft entered a Conservative Party meeting, expressed regret that he could not speak as scheduled because "My house is on fire." In Nashville, Julius Frankie Robinson explained to police why he had stolen his son from his ex-wife's sister: "To give him a bath...