Word: chaucer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...demolition expert, when his work is done: "But what have you created?" It is like expecting a bulldozer to build the Tower of Pisa; or condemning a bayonet for not being a plough. Shaw's genius was for intellectual slum-clearance, not for town planning . . . If Chaucer is the father of English literature, Shaw is the spinster aunt. By this I do not mean to imply that he was sexless ... It is only in his writing that the aunt in him rises up, full of warnings, wagged fingers and brandished umbrellas . . . Shaw was unique. An Irish aunt so gorgeously...
...Johns Hopkins' Kemp Malone, 67, brother of Biographer Dumas (Jefferson and His Time) Malone and himself a top authority on Old English literature. Because of his musical ear and his knowledge of phonetics, scholarly Kemp Malone could charm his classes by making the Canterbury Tales sound as if Chaucer himself were reading them. He could also terrify his students by storming at them over the slightest mistranslation. He continually failed to recognize even the brightest English majors, seldom entertained his colleagues, seemed to have an ingrained aversion to lunch at the faculty club. But for all his crotchets...
...that boasts a TV transmitter. In Brazil contestants compete for as much as 45,000 cruzeiros ($675); in Italy it is possible to win a fat bundle of 5,000,000 lire ($8,000); in Britain a Pakistani college girl got ?1,024 ($2,867) for her knowledge of Chaucer. Mexican viewers of The 64,000 Peso ($5,120) Question were grumbling that the sponsor was asking impossible questions to avoid paying the jackpot, but finally a textile engineer named Jaime Olvera broke the bank by identifying two of Cortez' scouts in his war with the Aztecs. Said...
...Humor because he thought he must. As the most popular humorous writer in contemporary English prose, his readers look to him for some kind of definitive comment on humor, which he surely does not give them in Sense of Humor. Mainly an anthology of various scraps of humor since Chaucer, it reels pompously though eight hundred years of English literature in search of some kind of principle. The most amusing thing about the book is that Potter could just as well have written his opening sentence, "The day of English humor is declining," and left it at that...
...Perhaps the language of Chaucer and Churchill is better for now including k-veniences, which are hangers, coinveniences, which hold money for parking meters, kon-veen-yunt tire chains, foodtainers and keytainers, roylies, which are doilies, plast-t-cap thumbtacks, tasteas, teariffic teabags, kar-pokits, diced cream, expaditers (pads of paper), slipper-grippers, chap sticks, paper mates, superfection strawberries, dangeratings, schweppervescence . . . Ladies can do lots in culottes, and summarize in summer dresses, size 16-40. After a long day in the office, their husbands come home and slip on their leisuals...