Word: blushes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...blush to be so philosophical in theory, and such a wretched creature in practice," Voltaire admitted. "All tastes at once have entered my soul." Among them: the taste for rebelling and the taste for survival-rather splendid survival at that. Living with his mistress, Madame du Châtelet, in the château of Cirey, Voltaire powdered and dressed as if in Paris. She and Voltaire dined in elegance "with lots of silver," gave glittering balls, and inveigled house guests into amateur theatricals. Cirey had its own theater; and between noon and 7 o'clock the next morning...
...Taylor's central characters perform their own self-analysis. Each is tremendously curious and thoughtful about what and why something is happening to him and why he reacts as he does. The reader experiences with him every nervous blush, sweat, grope, and moment of insight...
...Moby Dick? In framing answers, Noel Perrin, professor of English at Dartmouth, takes as his point of departure Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who had a passion for chess and prison reform and an aversion to London smog, sick people, and all writing that, as he put it, "can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty." Certainly the Family Shakespeare (first edition 1807, second edition 1818) became the most popular expurgation in literary history. It gave Bowdler's name immortality as part of the language. But Perrin is up against not one man but a state of mind...
...Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion of sexual topics. In fact, gobbledygook and nice-Nellyism still extend as far as the ear can hear. Housewives on television may chat about their sex lives in terms that a decade ago would have made gynecologists blush; more often than not, these emancipated women still speak about their children's "going to the potty." Government spokesmen talk about "redeployment" of American troops; they mean withdrawal. When sociologists refer to blacks living in slums, they are likely to mumble about "nonwhites" in a "culturally deprived environment...
...impulse was not particularly puritanical, at least in its early stages. There may have been an ascetic tradition in the monasteries, but Irish behavior at wakes, centuries before they had learned to sublimate with Guinness, was so obscene that the chroniclers (unfortunately) blush to describe it. We do know that at some point, a mock priest with a rosary of potatoes round his neck performed a mock wedding. Death and rebirth were usually celebrated together, until sharp poverty came along in the 17th century to make birth a curse, and sex no laughing matter...