Word: bumptiousness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Another Lunch. Melchior was not the only one prepared to rescue grand opera. In Manhattan, bustling little Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed-up Bizet in Carmen Jones, got front-page publicity with a proposal that wasn't as bumptious as it at first sounded. Five years ago, Billy had lunched with some Met board members, and made what Board Chairman George A. Sloan now gingerly refers to as "a number of helpful observations which were conveyed to our . . . management." Now Billy was again ready to be the Met's little helper...
...Scholar). After a dismal year as a prep-school Latin teacher, he taught English at Vanderbilt (with time out for World War I) for 23 years. Until the Fugitives woke him from his "dogmatic slumber," Ransom was a conventional teacher who took few pains to inspire his students. The bumptious crop of younger Fugitives stimulated him both as poet and teacher. Ransom, say his admirers in the Sewanee Review, did not try to dominate; he attained more enduring effects by the example of his intellectual decorum, the flavor of his conversation, the elegance of his craft...
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...
...wealthy Rand pioneer's son, Erleigh had the financial backing; he soon picked up the mining experience. In 1933, he helped Abraham Sundel Hersov form the Anglo-Transvaal Investment Co., Ltd., and together they made a killing in Rand mines. But "Bob" Hersov was too cautious for bumptious, erratic Norby Erleigh. By 1935 Erleigh, then 32, had broken away from Anglovaal, and he had made his first million. He had also lost all desire to quit...
...potentially amorous Freshmen is a needless irritant. At best, the chaperon system acts as a front to comfort parents worried about the intoxicating effect of almost unlimited freedom on their sons. At worst, it simply lingers as an obsolete carry, over from the old arrangement that held the bumptious Freshman in his "proper" place. Surely any such prep-schoolish requirement--that two "disinterested observers" oversee the activities of one couple--should follow having and beanies into oblivion...