Word: borings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mary found a dreamer like her father, but several times larger than life. She absorbed much of his apocalyptic optimism and encyclopedic learning. She also took time to ponder the casualties that Shelley's blithe spirit left in its wake. In the year before she began Frankenstein, she bore Shelley a daughter who lived less than two weeks. She confided a heartbreaking vision to her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think...
...point Biographer Lytton Strachey wrote to Economist Maynard Keynes of his "adoration" for Painter Duncan Grant, little knowing that Keynes would soon make Grant his lover. Grant later lived with Painter Vanessa Bell; when she bore their child, the happy event was cheered not only by Keynes but by Vanessa's absentee husband, Art Critic Clive Bell, and her former lover, Critic-Painter Roger...
...Soviet archaeologists conjecture that the buried nobles of Shibarghan were members of a local ruling family in the midst of this dark period. One sign of kinship: two skeletons bore rings of identical design. Sarianidi's theory is that a family patriarch stumbled upon the long buried temple and appropriated it as a royal necropolis. For 200 years successive generations were apparently buried at the unmarked site, probably by night to outwit grave robbers...
...Eric Partridge, 85, indefatigable English lexicographer and student of the language's quirks and conventions; in Devon, England. Born in New Zealand and educated in Australia and at Oxford, the tall, spare Partridge abandoned a budding career as an English professor (he feared he would become "a bloody bore") to devote himself to publishing and writing. Though he once turned out a novel in a month for his Scholartis Press in London, he gave up fiction to make a profession of his passion: the study of words. Over five decades, he compiled 16 erudite lexicons devoted to slang, cliches...
...irony of ironies, has a heart of gold. Jack cares for his clients and his employees, provides for his friends, avoids depraved sex and even talks to cats. He is the proverbial good man in a bad time (1971, approaching the end of Viet Nam) and a first-class bore. Even his day-to-day working life lacks thrills. Most of the time Gazzara just wanders about aimlessly with a rueful grin plastered on his face, much as he did in John Cassavetes' tedious The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Like all saints, though, Jack must be tempted...