Word: bywords
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When the Class of 1931 entered Harvard for its freshman year, times were going well for the College and the country. The hip flask was the byword of the day, Babe Ruth was just about to hit his 60th home run, and the gentleman 'C' was easier than ever to get. Four years later, things were different. There were apple carts on Fifth Avenue, obnoxious structures known as "houses" for upperclassmen to live in, and the Democrats had begun to show designs on the White House. But few could imagine--or cared about--such things in the future...
...Neither a flabby gradualism nor the use of federal troops can achieve a humane and realistic answer to this emotion-charged issue. Instead, the NAACP should move as fast as it can--as fast as particular local conditions will allow. Gradualism, which has become the off-the-hook byword in a presidential campaign, must not assume that because resistance is strong in some areas and the process will be slow, the integration everywhere in the South should not be rushed...
...surrealist heyday, Salvador Dali made his name a byword with his meticulously rendered crutches, melon-shaped buttocks and limp watches dramatically set against elongated dream vistas. But when Dali moved his subconscious props into religious art after World War II, his work left the critics cold. For his recent Manhattan show Dali personally grabbed the limelight by mugging with his wax-bean mustache, but his work drew a bouquet of cabbages. His smooth-as-melted-ice-cream paint surfaces reminded one critic of "old miniatures painted on celluloid." Other critics deplored the "vacant trivialities" in the show...
...newspaper feature writer and book reviewer while he perfected his seamless style, finally scored in 1934 with Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The success of Chips led readers and reviewers back to Lost Horizon, written several months earlier, and soon "Shangri-La," the novel's Tibetan Utopia, became an international byword for any man's place of retreat from the world, including Franklin Roosevelt's wartime Maryland hideaway. (Ironically, it was also the name announced by Roosevelt as the place of origin of General Jimmy Doolittle's 1942 Tokyo raid.) Both Lost Horizon and Chips sold more than...
...Those madmen over at Disney's" became a Hollywood byword. One Disney animator, for instance, was found lying flat on his back on the sidewalk in a pouring rain. As a policeman dragged him off to the station house, the fellow protested that he had been "studying lightning...