Word: blight
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister...
...villagers. There they go for a crowded weekly calendar of services, whist drives, community sings, jumble (rummage) sales and church dances. There, since 1944, tall, sturdy Rev. Arthur Patrick has presided over his flock. Until last month, few in Robin Hood's Bay knew what a blight had been eating away at that flock for the past 20 years...
...days after the vicar's sermon, there were no letters. One woman, who didn't think the blight was over, predicted that they would start again with the next new moon. Last week she got one: "You are a fine one to talk about the full moon affecting anyone as you are a daft bitch whether the moon is full, new or waning. ... If the vicar wasn't so dull he would easily find out who is sending these poison letters...
...days later, with some sample sketches tucked hopefully under his arm, a stout, bumbling, bemonocled young man called on Mr. Dickens to ask for the vacant job. The novelist took a quick look at the sketches and shook his head. "Had it not been for that unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence," declared William Makepeace Thackeray many years later, "I should have tried to be not a writer, but a painter or designer of pictures...
...Cockadoodleodoodle!" After the "unfortunate blight," Thackeray began writing art criticism. His nom de plume, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, became a feared and hated name among Britain's painters. Even when he had become a novelist and was rolling in royalties ("?10,000 - Cock-adoodleodoodle"), he was still "bitten with my old mania...