Word: bumpkins
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...epigraphs can be embarrassing, especially if they are better than the prose that follows. Busch rashly prefaces a chapter that deals with a child's illegitimacy with Ring Lardner's grand old gag about the bumpkin who remarks, on learning that his friend was born out of wedlock, "That's mighty pretty country around there." Lardner's act is hard to follow, and by comparison, Busch's novel is as solemn as a convocation of bishops. Its most egregious epigraphy comes before the climactic scene. The book's central figure, a bombastic newspaper publisher...
...Rolfe clearly had a wonderful time writing about them, and British Bibliographer Cecil Woolf, in his introduction, provides a convenient Who's Who. Grant Richards, publisher of such authors as Shaw and Housman, appears in the novel as Doron Oldcastle, "an ostentatious tyrannical turpilucricupidous half-licked pragmatic provincial bumpkin." Publisher John Lane, who published works by Anatole France, Ernest Dowson and Francis Thompson, is seen as Slim Schelm, "a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer." Oldcastle commissions Crabbe to write a history of the Medici family for ?1 a week...
...youngster who comes to college is an ill-informed, irresponsible, unambitious product of American adolescence. His vision of life rarely goes beyond beer, dates, and perhaps reading a good book. And on this ill-kempt bumpkin depends the future of America. Out of such material we will build IBM machines and a World Bank. Obviously the college must do heroic things...
Personal Status. As Premier of the new "government," Ferhat Abbas represents a more moderate choice than might have been expected. A placid ex-pharmacist who speaks much better French than Arabic ("I cannot read Arabic, and I speak it like a country bumpkin"), Abbas was long the recognized leader of the pro-French Moslems, has worked most of his life to bring France and Moslem Algerians into a decent, humane relationship. Though he was twice jailed by the French and called a salaud (dirty bum) by a right-wing Deputy when he was a member of the French Constituent Assembly...
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...