Word: billiken
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Congress. Since Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon (1837-1927), who finally met in Jack Garner his match at poker, no man, not even the late convivial Nick Longworth, enjoyed such influence among members on both sides of the aisle in both Houses as this stubby, stubborn, pink & white billiken with the beak of an owl, eyebrows like cupid's-wings, tongue of a cowhand. He takes Capitol freshmen aside and instructs them philosophically. "Now, Scott," he said, for example, to Senator Lucas of Illinois, "first thing to do is to get other Senators' respect, if you have to fight...
Henry Louis Mencken has filled some 15 books and countless heads with his brilliant palaver. The Billiken-god of a generation that read his Smart Set like so many monthly revelations, he emancipated many a corn-fed adolescent. Mencken was an iconoclastic prophet but not an indignant one. "As an American," he said once, "I naturally spend most of my time laugh-ing." And his brilliance, like that of his fellow-iconoclast, Bernard Shaw, has not always done him justice. Some of his trumpetings have merely deafened the ears they assaulted, some of his more winning piccolo-and-bassoon effects...
...Liberty (adapted from Michel Duran by Sidney Howard; Gilbert Miller, producer). The news about Ode to Liberty is that Ina Claire is now wearing her blonde hair piled in curls on top of her head like a charming Billiken. This hair dress and the Claire glamour manage to keep fluttering this airy nothing of a play. It concerns a Parisian lady who has left her overbearing banker husband for a small apartment of her own. There she unexpectedly finds herself playing unwilling hostess to a Communist fugitive (Walter Siezak, ingratiating young hero of Music in the Air). He is supposed...