Word: burtonizing
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...Billy Barton race, a smothering race, pulling away in great bounds at the start with a speed clearly geared to last to the finish. At the first mile he was four lengths in front. Brose Hover, even money favorite and last year's winner, with seasoned Crawford Burton up, took a nasty fall at the second jump, but Burton had remounted and was coming on behind. Sea Soldier was running easily in second place. Well back, though still in it, were the black & white silks of Bostonian Sumner Pingree's Soissons, ridden by Jack Skinner...
...possibly three, most proficient linguists of whom we have historical authentication. None could match his peculiar ability in disguising himself. In almost all his undertakings the odds were against him, and it was his lot to be robbed of most of the glory he earned." Capt. Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), most scholarly of adventurers, most swashbuckling of scholars, seems fated to be famed chiefly as translator of an "uncastrated" version of the Arabian Nights.? If his wife had not burned many of his unpublished, scandalous and scholarly papers, his fame might have been even greater among orientalists...
...stormy years. But his interest had already fastened on Oriental languages which he studied by himself with no other help than a grammar and dictionary. "He used to say that when he set out to acquire a language, he learned swear words and after that the rest was easy." Burton was big, bearded, muscular. When he took up fencing it was in no garden-party spirit; he became one of the foremost swordsmen of Europe...
...Burton's soldier father was glad to further his son's military ambition, but was too poor to buy him a commission in a crack regiment. Young Richard had to be content with the native army of the East India Company. But the routine of army life soon bored him; he was always putting in for risky assignments: investigations in disguise among the natives, a journey to Harrar in Somaliland, whence no white man had ever returned; searching for the source of the Nile (his companion Speke got the credit for discovering Victoria Nyanza, but Burton led the expedition...
...Burton was of the genus lion, even in society. "When a princess gave him a 'high handshake' he grasped her elbow and lowered her arm. That cured her." Once an archbishop ventured to tease him about his interest in monkeys, asked if he was studying his ancestry. "Well, my lord," said Burton, "I at least have made a little progress, but what about your lordship who is descended from the angels...