Word: corking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Sir George Oliver Colthurst, 68, owner of Blarney Castle and its famed Blarney Stone; of heart disease; in Blarney, County Cork, Ireland. Scholars are uncertain whether the Stone's ability to impart eloquent persuasiveness to all who kiss it began as a folk legend or a pressagent's idea. Whatever its source, the story spread until it gave a word to the language, a handsome yearly revenue to the castle's owners. Likeliest story: legend was inspired by Cormach McDermod Carthy, an early iyth Century occupant of the castle, for his verbal skill at harassing Queen...
...rush of air to a broken window. There has been one such accident, but it did not turn out too badly. An airline hostess was sucked to a window, but her hips were wide enough to stick in the frame and save her from being popped like a cork into the empty air.* The pressure difference (only 2½ lbs. per sq. in.) was not great enough to extrude her completely. ("Still," said one CAA official, "whenever I see a child banging on the plane window with a toy, I get up and tell him to stop...
...Golden State (by Samuel Spewack; produced by Bella Spewack) is a hack comedy that sinks even that bounciest and most cork-brained of comediennes, Josephine Hull. Playwright Spewack sets out to kid California's well-known ambition to be El Dorado when, it grows up. Actress Hull plays a hopeful landlady who, through a Spanish ancestor, lays property claims to all of Beverly Hills. Ernest Truex plays a hopeful prospector who thinks he discovers gold in Miss Hull's back yard and makes frenzied forty-niners of the other roomers...
...artificial coin. Harvard is a good step above Yale and Princeton in university maturity." President A. Whitney Griswold, who once turned down a Skull and Bones bid to become Wolf's Head, agrees. "We could learn much from Harvard's independence," he says. "But the administration is like a cork floating in a whirlpool. It can't change this tradition...
...Other proponents of the plan: Housing Suppliers Charles E. Wilson (General Electric), John D. Biggers (Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass), Ben Moreell (Jones & Laughlin Steel), Melvin Baker (National Gypsum), Clifford J. Backstrand (Armstrong Cork), Lewis H. Brown (Johns-Manville), J. Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr. (Weyerhaeuser Timber...