Word: compliments
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Cruel to the Young. Many travelers in Britain conclude that the British are kinder to animals-parakeets, dogs and horses -than to children. A horrified Scandinavian told an Englishman, "You treat your children like dogs," and then had to explain that no compliment was intended. An official of the N.S.P.C.C. charges that cruelty to the young is common to every class, income group, and area: "All over the country children are ill-used, and too many parents think they have the right to beat their child unmercifully and beyond the limits any human being should be called upon to endure...
...anything controversial.' Others say, 'Pour it on.' Still others say, 'Don't make any speeches.' In any event, a defeated candidate always runs a risk that members of the other party will accuse him of bad sportsmanship if he does anything other than compliment the new Administration. I shall speak as a private citizen, saying those things I believe are in the best interests of the nation...
...Lenin Peace Prizes, awarded on May Day eve, honored a couple of unlikely apostles of tranquillity last week: Cuba's Premier Fidel Castro and Guinea's President Sékou Touré. To Touré the prize seemed something of a lefthanded compliment. "We are not Communists," he proclaimed, but he accepted anyway. Castro, not a bit abashed, announced that he might rush right off to Moscow to pick up his 25,000 rubles ($27,750), added with uncharacteristic modesty that he thought of the prize "not as a personal award, but as an unmatched and great honor...
...While playing with the Birmingham Repertory Company in the 1920s, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, now 68, gave Britain some of its finest theatrical hours, earned the especial esteem of the creator of many of his most challenging roles. Recalls Hardwicke in his memoirs, A Victorian in Orbit: "Probably the handsomest compliment ever paid me was delivered by Bernard Shaw. 'You are,' he said, 'my fifth favorite actor, the first four being the Marx Brothers.' " Knighted in 1934, Hardwicke well remembers the occasion. King George V could not quite catch the actor's name, finally gave...
Flat World. The kingdom of Laos* is about the size of Great-Britain, but is landlocked, lackadaisical, and so primitive that the currently favored adjective, "underdeveloped," would be an unwarranted compliment. A recent U.S. survey disclosed that 90% of all Laotians think the world is flat-and populated mainly by Laotians...