Word: bookishly
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Minus Mathematics. William Stuart Symington III (he trimmed the name to W. Stuart Symington as a businessman, dropped the W. when he got into politics) was an "extravagantly beautiful" child, recalls his doting sister Louise. Absorbing the household's bookish atmosphere-adorning the mantle was a Latin motto that translates as "Life without literature is death"-little Stu read so avidly that the family called him "the professor." As his Christmas present when he was ten, he asked for and got a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
Foot doctors began to be called chiropodists in the 18th century - just why is not certain.* Down the years they have winced as though somebody had stepped on their corns when patients mispronounced the first syllable "sheer" or confused them with chiropractors. The bookish among them were bothered, too, to find that H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage waspishly called the word chiropodist "a barbarism and a genteelism," added that the normal word for such a practitioner should be "corn-cutter...
Blundering Theorist. For five years Minister of Interior Vallenilla Lanz, 45, had been Perez Jimenez' chief flatterer, political soothsayer and official philosopher. Suave, well educated (at Paris' Sorbonne) and bookish, Minister Vallenilla mixed ideas from Mussolini, Thorstein Veblen and the U.S. fad of technocracy into a theory justifying dictatorship as the happiest state for Venezuelans. In working out what he called a "New National Ideal," Francophile, anticlerical Vallenilla Lanz led the dictator into many a blunder. One was December's unpalatable yes-or-no plebiscite for a second five-year term. Another was a conflict with...
...Prudential was not seriously involved in the great scandals. Founded a quarter of a century earlier by a sober, bookish young man named John Fairfield Dryden, it did its first business in "industrial insurance" for the workingman, policies that cost only pennies a week for up to $500 worth of life insurance. By 1911, when Founder Dryden died, it had 10 million policyholders on its rolls, soon afterward started shifting over from a stock company to a mutual operation owned by its policyholders...
...Search of Self. Hopper's search for self has been long, arduous and undeviating. It began in the town of Nyack, N.Y.. up the Hudson River from Manhattan. There he was a bookish, gawky, well-bred boy-the son of a scholarly and unbusinesslike merchant-who built his own sailboat at the age of twelve. Five years later he enrolled in Robert Henri's art school on Manhattan's 57th Street. Henri was the presiding genius of an American art movement sneeringly dubbed the "Ash Can School." Instead of the vapid, idealistic studio pictures then...