Word: bumptiousness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...corporation lawyer who has pampered his family until they are all incorrigible. His wife's senile intimacies with a Russian prince and a willowy interior decorator are nauseating; his elder married daughter is verging on adultery; his subdebutante child reeks of alcohol; his undergraduate son is a bumptious...
...lawyer so fortunate as to convert his woman into his wife is played by Walter Huston who last week delighted Manhattan in person in The Commodore Marries (see p. 18). While this couple are buffeted about by the vicissitudes of their liaison, chiefly consisting of the lawyer's bumptious children, they often run afoul of the lawyer's drinking crony (Charles Ruggles). Anyone who has ever laughed at drolleries induced by the decanter will be amused by this gentleman whose dialog is so real that it suggests the use of a dictaphone. Best shot: Claudette Colbert being told...
Since "collegiate" and its derivatives seemed to need a definition, Dean Gauss ventured: "To me it [collegiate] means nonsense, fiddle-faddle, bumptious social immaturity complicated sometimes but not always by acute class consciousness...
Henry D. Perky was not a "dyspeptic lawyer." His invention of shredded wheat occurred about fifteen years after he left the practice of law. He did not "peddle his biscuits in baskets" (bumptious bunk!) either in Nebraska, which he left about 1879, or in Denver, where, in 1893, he was, as always, dignified and rather magnificent. If those who have been trying to make his story sell biscuits had first taken the obvious step of looking up the history of this one of our most characteristically vital Americans, they could have undoubtedly made valuable copy and sold more biscuits...
Caprice. "Life is so much easier," says the dyspeptic but incorrigibly playful Albert Von Echardt, "when you have a great many ties to choose from." He communicated this illuminating morsel of information to his bastard son, poetic and bumptious youth of 16, whom he was meeting for the first time. Albert had in fact been unaware of his child's existence until its mother, a somewhat charming though intensely idealistic creature, whom he had once betrayed and since forgotten, visited him. The purpose of her visit was to ask that Robert be permitted to live with his father...