Word: coffin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gyascutus. prock, tree squeak and swamp gaboon rolled into one. Bernhardt, it is said, would swirl onstage with "eyes that resembled holes burned into a sheet of paper"; her lines she sang in a melodious but somewhat fruity "voice of gold." Rumor had it that she slumbered in a coffin lined with silk. The majestic Modjeska once held a U.S. audience "clutched in [her] spell" with a heartbreaking recital of what she later admitted was the Polish alphabet, and the mighty Duse would petulantly play her big scenes hidden from the audience...
...want of a hearse, her family postponed the funeral, and for two nights and three days stood vigil by the rough-hewn wooden coffin in which Mavis lay. Last week, with a hearse and 200 friends of the bereaved gathered outside the Sithebe hut, Mavis' father stood ready, hammer in hand, to nail the coffin's lid, while Mavis' grandmother knelt down with a basin of water and washed the girl's wan face. Slowly, the body stirred and turned over, face down. Father and grandmother dropped hammer and basin and rushed from the hut. Followed...
Deadfall's first blunder is to show all this at the outset, so that the second, or courtroom, half of the evening merely drives in the coffin nails. There is no suspense and-a second serious error-no final twist that might help save the day. Among other blunders, the writing is studiously mediocre...
...first things the America undertaker changed was the old "wooden overcoat." In an age when the grave robber and the medical student were supposedly working hand in glove, "safe" coffins, made at first of iron, came in vogue. Soon there were models in zinc, glass terra cotta, papier-mâché, hydraulic cement and vulcanized rubber. The coffin torpedo, marketed in 1878, was the final answer to body snatchers-it featured a bomb that was triggered to go off when the coffin lid was lifted. However, the triumph of sepulchral gadgeteering was the "life signal," which offered mechanical surcease...
Gingerbread & Root Beer. When technology had run its gamut, the "aesthetic movement" began. The word "coffin" was suddenly offensive, and undertakers spoke in hushed tones of the "artistic casket." Scrolls proliferated, along with cut glass sculptured silver and Venetian lace. A few years of this and a poet prayed: "Mother dear, when I lie dead / Bury me not in gingerbread...