Word: bearding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...beard has also been under fire as "a hindrance to spitting and a disturbance to elocution," a symbol of animal lust and corruption, an impediment to gas masks, an affront to pure womanhood. Detractors of the beard might even argue that the shaven jowl is invaluable in time of war: e.g., the Saxons might have won the Battle of Hastings if they had not panicked at sight of the clean-shaven Norman army. (They concluded that it consisted entirely of "Presbyteros"-which is Latin for "priests," Author Reynolds hastily explains, "not Presbyterians-a fantasy far more terrifying...
Where are the beards of yesteryear-the "Spade," the "Tile," the "Uncle Sam," the "Van Dyke," the "Piccadilly Weeper," the "Cathedral?" Where is the like of Huguenot Admiral de Coligny's beard, which served as a pincushion for the admiral's toothpicks? Where is the beaver of iyth Century Bishop Camus of Bellai-a growth so formidable that he used to split it up, as an aid to memory, into the necessary sections and subsections of his sermons? And where is the beard of Austrian Burgomaster Hans Steininger-the one in which he caught his toe, tripped...
Britain's Reginald Reynolds, a "confirmed serendipitist" (discoverer of unexpected treasures) and the author of a learned, witty study of sewage-disposal problems (Cleanliness and Godliness, TIME, May 6, 1946), is no nostalgic yearner for the boskier days of old. In Beards he stands aloof (and beardless), a lollipop in one cheek and his tongue in the other, and lets the pro-and anti-beard factions fight...
...Fence Me In. Foes of the beard have been sniping at it for thousands of years, heaping it with vulgarity and ridicule. When, says Reynolds, mustachioed Czar Peter the Great rebuked a Western ambassador for being effeminately clean-shaven, the envoy pertly retorted: "Had my royal master measured wisdom by the beard, he would have sent a goat." Peter, who had a marked tendency to kowtow before degenerate Western ways, was so impressed by this remark that he levied a tax on all Russian beards...
Charles Meryon is not a familiar name in art, but it stands for some of the most highly prized etchings ever made. A wizened little man with a black beard and distrustful eye, Meryon 100 years ago set himself the task of putting the people and particularly the architecture of Paris onto copper. A few clear-seeing critics, including Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, praised him to the skies. Meryon brushed aside the praise. He was a perfectionist and he brought no more than a dozen of his meticulously etched plates to the standard that he demanded of himself...