Word: bookishness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dapple-bearded little Philosopher C. E. M. Joad, 56, of the University of London, is familiar to British radio listeners as the wittily bumptious know-it-all of Brains Trust (BBC's recently ended version of Information Please). To bookish laymen and lecture-goers he is known as a racy popularizer of philosophy ("Philosophy should be about something that matters"). Clergymen once knew him as an annoying, church-baiting agnostic; at least one angry sermon has been preached on "God, Joad and the Devil...
...Except to the bookish," he writes, "many of what are called the Standard Novelists have the set air of an officially appointed committee. We had fallen into the error of believing that they [wrote] for critics, for literary historians, for students or for leisured persons of academic tastes; and people who read only the best authors usually let one know it. We had easily forgotten that the masters . . . stood above their contemporaries and survived them, because they were more readable, more entertaining, more suggestive and incomparably more able than the common run of novelists...
...others." Gossip Writer Charles Graves claimed: "My deep research into the source of the word shows that it was originally used colloquially by race-gangs [for] a shady character who lives by his wits, but without the physical or mental courage to show violence or turn burglar." A bookish reporter for the Daily Mail delved into a forgotten volume called The Autobiography of a Spiv, published in 1937. The word Spiv, he claimed after thorough study, had a 19th Century origin, connoting well-dressed or dandified...
Beside the members of his husky flock, pint-sized (5 ft. 2½ in.), bookish Pastor Burger looks even smaller than he is. But he has a voice that can outshout any of them, and he knows how to use a picka-roon to nudge the four-foot "blocks" from their great stacks into the river, and how to help sluice them through the dams with a pike pole. "Wish I had a soft job," the men sometimes yell at him when he comes by in his red and black checked jacket; but they laugh when they...
...Britain's House of Commons, the art of conversation had hard going. Bookish Food Minister John Strachey (The Coming Struggle for Power) tried to interrupt a speech by another member, who suggested he "wait until I have finished." Retorted Strachey: "Keep your temper." Objected Conservative Sir Gifford Fox: "Surely that is not a ministerial expression. . . . Take your hands out of your pockets and sit down." Shouted Strachey: ". . . schoolboy stuff !" The Speaker finally got a little quiet. "There is tea being provided," he announced, "in the corridor outside...