Word: bumpkin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stumping the backwoods during one of his presidential campaigns, Andrew Jackson decided to impress his bumpkin constituents with his scholarship, let fly in bear-shaped tones with all the Latin he knew: "E pluribus unum, my friends, sine qua non, ne plus ultra, multo in parvo!" Applause resounded for miles; Jackson not only won the election, but also got an honorary LL.D. Or so says Allen Walker Read, associate professor of English at Columbia University, who tucked tongue in cheek and presented choice samples of fractured Latin in an address to the Linguistic Society of America...
...There was a mean trick played on us somewhere," sighs Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan), the back-country bumpkin who is the picture's hero. "God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people." Ty Ty himself is all too human. For 15 years, instead of plowing his fields, he has spent his working hours digging them full of enormous holes in a sleeveless search for legendary treasure. And every time he digs in "God's Little Acre," the plot whose yield he has allotted to his church, Ty Ty reluctantly...
...Sullivan has just one full rehearsal and you NEVER know-where you are." She twirled a baton-"Gotta get in shape with my magic wand" -then skipped off to sing her one number, Impossible ("for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage, for a plain country bumpkin and a prince to join in marriage...
Boilerplate & Bumpkin Prose. In many areas, fast-growing suburbs have produced weekly and semiweekly chains that are as slick in appearance and informative in content as their city cousins. Chicago's Arlington Heights Herald and seven other suburban weeklies (combined circ. 20,630) owned by Paddock Publications led all U.S. weeklies last year in advertising volume. Cleveland's Heights Sun-Press (circ. 29,000), serving 14 communities, runs a regular Washington column on subjects that affect suburbanites, boasts that none of the political candidates or school bond issues it has backed in twelve years has been defeated...
Even outside metropolitan areas, most small-town weeklies, from the Reedsport, Ore. Port Umpqua Courier (circ. 1,620) to the Lexington Park (Md.) Enterprise (circ. 2,356), have thrown out the smudgy type and bumpkin prose that once characterized the weekly press, now run staff-written stories and editorials instead of the boilerplate and canned sermons that once crammed country papers. The old-time jack-of-all-trades country editor has been largely supplanted by trained staffs. Lured out of the cities by the prospect of editorial and economic independence, trained newsmen in increasing numbers are bringing professional standards...