Word: corking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...quiet reserve and dignity you observed probably can be credited to the Baker wives, most of whom have made their way to Cambridge by now . . . . The boys who got amphib are scaring the wits out of everybody by making blood-thirsty Tarzan calls while running around besmudged with burnt cork . . . That white hat which "Admiral" Colby wore while the plain folk marched in garrisons was not the manifestation of rugged individualism. He had misplaced the other job, and had nothing else to wear, it says here . . . thoughts while strolling, as the immortal McIntyre used to write--wonder when Bill Ingram...
...green, grey weekend in 1896, George Bernard Shaw (see above) went down to Stratford St. Andrew in Suffolk to visit his good Fabian friends, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The other guest was an idealistic Irish girl named Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend: she came from County Cork; her father was a millionaire. After the holiday Shaw wrote his beloved correspondent, Actress Ellen Terry: "I am going to refresh my heart by falling in love with her. I love falling in love...
Born in 1790, Mathew went to Ireland's famed Maynooth seminary, got expelled for his convivial ways. He joined the poverty-praising Franciscans, later got a parish in poverty-ridden Cork. Unlike most priests of his time, Father Mathew gladly worked with Protestants ("We should bear with each other as God bears with us all"). On one civic committee he sat with a Quaker, William Martin. When ever the evils of liquor were discussed Quaker Martin would say: "Ah, Theobald Mathew, if thou wouldst take the matter up." One day Father Mathew swore off whisky punch, signed a total...
Within eight months 150,000 people of Cork and nearby areas had taken the pledge. Soon Father Mathew was drying up Irishmen by the thousand. Within six years Ireland's annual consumption of whiskey fell from twelve and a quarter million to five and a half million gallons...
Seven years later he died and was buried among the poor people of Cork. Today his grave is still a place of pilgrimage, covered with pathetic rags and flowers which admiring Catholic teetotalers leave behind...