Word: cankering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...underlying the humor. The father who gets kicked in the groin has been trying to make up to his small son for his orphaned state. The husband and wife who belabor each other seem right off the burlesque stage, but the story's aim is to expose the canker that lies at the heart of comedy. Ohio-born James Purdy, 34, writes in a manner that is all his own, using a prose at once precise and clumsy, almost as if he had learned English well but late in life. People "grunt" out entire sentences, voices "darken" at listeners...
...Beaverbrook hankered to succeed Winston Churchill in Britain's dark days of 1941 and 1942, says Driberg, and suffered such intense inner conflict between the "canker of ambition" and his genuine friendship for Churchill that, racked with psychosomatic asthma, he quit the Cabinet in the "supreme nervous crisis of his life...
...Challenge. One canker of doubt, however, is disturbing all the hallelujahs about the glorious new TV season. Its name: The $64,000 Question. The instant, smash success of the quiz show dreamed up by Lou Cowan has brought a flood of imitators promising to give contestants everything from a producing oil well to a quarter of a million dollars. The industry is quivering with the unmistakable impulse of a new "trend." NBC's Weaver, instead of planning new telecasts from Mars or from the bottom of the sea, has been closeted with Question's sponsor (Revlon), promising them...
...would like to make it all unnecessary by learning how to spot in advance the recruit who will go over the hill or sock the skipper. Also, since some bad apples will always get through, it would like to be able to look at each and decide whether the canker of bad conduct can be cut out so that the offender can safely be returned to duty...
...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...