Word: compost
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...English gentleman after all: he is an international crook who, as a French paper prettily puts it, "collects precious stones, chiefly diamonds." As for Paul, he climbs up to Joss's bedroom and is about to collect something more precious than stones, when Eliot relegates him to the compost heap with a single knife-stab. Suddenly, the beautiful old house rings to the tramp of invading flatfeet and the idyl ends with a whimper: "Mother. I want Mother...
...earth." The Dutch, already in the long shadows of a dying empire, promptly exiled him to Flores in the Outer Islands, where with thousands of other political detainees he continued his revolutionary education, reading insatiably in Dutch, English, French and Indonesian and drawing new conclusions from an odd compost of Lenin, Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, Otto Bauer, Abraham Lincoln. He took time out-to divorce his wealthy widow and marry a young and beautiful Javanese girl named Fatmawati. He had no doubts about the future. "I entered prison a leader and I shall emerge a leader," he said...
BEAU CLOWN, by Berthe Grimault (188 pp.; Rinehart; $3), a crawling compost heap of a novel, accepts as normal and comical the sort of horror about which seamy-side Novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote with fascination. Author Grimault describes a degenerate clan of French peasants and the flotsam that fetches up at their farm-two prostitutes, four U.S. Negro soldiers foraging for sex, and a netful of AWOL lunatics, including a gently demented old clown and a bloody-nailed slug named Chopper (he is obsessed with decapitation). When Chopper is gored by a huge white bull, a litter...
...years of breakfast-table chatter with some 15,000 headliners on TV and radio, Tex and Jinx McCrary have learned the ABCs of interviewing. In their latest inquisition, a five-a-week daytime TV show called Close-Up, they have overextended themselves, and the result is a sort of compost: a pinch of Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life and a watered-down heap of Mike Wallace's Night Beat (which McCrary says is "a carbon copy of one of my old shows"). Last week the McCrarys snagged a performer who had turned Wallace down cold: Negro Singer...
...dinning a new language into the U.S. ear. It is something like English, but it has a grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of its own. It grows out of a rich compost of dialects heard at Lindy's and the Stork Club, in the hominy-grits-and-corn-pone belt and around Hollywood and Vine. It is calculatedly lowbrow: and out of the mouths of M.C.s, comedians, interviewers, children's hosts, singers and announcers, it has become a powerful influence on American speech. Critic Clifton Fadiman calls it Televenglish...