Word: billiousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When not the target of hostile fire, the Special Artist was frequently decommissioned by the many illnesses and hard ships of the field. "I was down with an attack of the billious remittent fever. Brought on by exposure to the damned cli mate in the cussed swamps," wrote Alfred Waud, who was more artistic than literary, to a friend back home in 1862. Waud's brother William, who came to the U.S. from England in the 1850s and became a Special for Leslie's, fared little better. Wrote Alfred about Will: "Three weeks ago he had a sunstroke...
...Undergoing the rigors of a Manhattan dress-fitting one day she suddenly keeled over. Afterwards she admitted to her diary: "I always wanted to faint once, just to know how it felt; & it is very nasty; however heroines always faint, but authors never say it is because they are billious." This mysterious "billiousness" took her out of a fashionable Manhattan finishing school, sent her to European watering-places and seaside resorts (always fashionable places, however, where shoals of eligible young U. S. bachelors danced constant attendance), finally turned into a throat inflammation that carried...
| 1 |