Word: byword
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...over 30 years. They first appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Chinless, blowhard Andy Gump, his long-suffering, last-wording wife Min, and their billionaire Uncle Bim became as familiar to millions of newspaper readers as the neighbors, and Andy's anguished cry for help ("O, Mini") was a byword of the '30s. When a minor character called Mary Gold was heartlessly killed off (the first U.S. comic-strip figure to die), thousands of readers protested...
...many of her contemporaries Eleanor was a byword for wantonness, in Shakespeare four centuries later a "canker'd grandam"; by the time of Victoria, Charles Dickens thought it sufficient to call Eleanor "a bad woman." It was only as the 20th Century began that Historian Henry Adams took the queen's full measure, and pronounced her "the greatest of all Frenchwomen." Amy Kelly's Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings is the finest attempt, in English, to tell the queen's full story. It is a tale that the queen herself might have gasped...
Sammy's byword is "simplicity." "Take a great painting: it's usually simple. When it gets cluttered up it isn't so great." He likes to compose on trains: "There's something about the rhythm of train wheels. If I ever got on a real slow train to New York, I'd probably arrive with a slight symphony...