Word: bearding
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...Vichy's orders, De Lattre was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment at Riom. His wife smuggled him a small metal saw hidden in a bunch of flowers and a ten-yard rope wrapped in his laundry. He escaped, went underground and, hiding behind a freshly grown beard, made his way to London and Algiers, where he joined De Gaulle's Free French. He took over Army "B" (later the French First Army), landed it in the south of France and took it up the Rhone valley to the Rhine and the Danube. The First became proudly known...
...stove and a barred window without panes . . . The temperature [was] below freezing . . . Occasionally a bit of bread was thrown in to me . . . Every [few] days . . . NKVD men would burst in at night and carry out a most careful examination of the cell and of my person [including] the long beard which had grown during my imprisonment and which was stiff from pus that had run into it from my frostbitten face. I was kicked and beaten on these occasions...
...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...
Within a Budding Grove. All these arguments are plausible enough, but they cannot hold soup when the pro-beards come into action. Beavered Irishmen, for example, have always insisted that a beard is much handier and more absorbent than a table napkin (Author Reynolds concedes that his source for this is an English historian). Similarly, the 19th Century French Romantics demonstrated beyond doubt that by growing a broad enough beard a man could wear the same shirt collar for months on end. Moreover, as one authority has estimated, a bearded man could learn seven languages in the time spent...
...their heyday beards were valued for keeping women in their place, preventing chest colds and "clergyman's throat' for "[sucking] out the abundant and gross humors of the cheeks," for concealing weak chins, and for training, "like well-bred wall plants." Their combings made an excellent stuffing for cushions. When not being wagged, beards could be carried in a velvet bag (as was one 16th Century dandy's), or their ends were wrapped around a smart walking cane or twined in & out of the waist belt. At night, of course, the beard could serve as an extra...