Word: courtships
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Appeals, Farida ("Peerless") had other drawbacks as a queen in Islam. Before her marriage she had shocked orthodox Moslems with her Western ways. She dressed in the latest Paris fashions, swam and danced with vigor, and mixed freely with the cosmopolites in Alexandria's foreign colony. Her courtship by Egypt's young King Farouk had been a riotous affair during which the two were often seen careering through Cairo in Farouk's snappy speedster or dancing together at Shepheard's. Although some 400 Egyptians were trampled to death or otherwise injured in the jubilation that followed...
...unexplored territory and established precarious friendships with cannibals and tribes openly committed to the exclusion of whites. He had a good ear for their dialects, which he learned, and a nice inquiring eye for aboriginal customs. In one tribe he found what must have been the simplest form of courtship and marriage short of caveman seizure. The boy picked his girl, left a goat in front of her father's hut and got his wife. No words spoken, no fuss, no marriage ceremony. And if the bridegroom was too poor to own a goat, a bundle of firewood...
Tolstoy edited and published a household magazine, wrote a play for the family, and once, during his courtship, even an opera ("You have to invent [the words] yourselves," he told the household gravely: "only see ... that they sound Italian, and, most important, that nobody understands them"). He loved his school, where he personally taught the children of his farm hands; but most other forms of "progress" horrified him-e.g., the novelty of using kerosene in lamps instead of good old fat, the creation of a Russian parliament ("perfectly absurd"), colleges and careers for women (except where "help is needed...
...Bainton attributes the rise of romantic love to reaction against the Church's austerity. The "cult of adultery," with its emphasis on courtship, began during the Renaissance to romanticize the institution of marriage itself. According to Dr. Bainton, the modern idea of falling in love before marriage often has "the unhappy and unnecessary corollary that if romantic attachment wanes marriage should be terminated...
...high points-Thunderhead's sensuous, rushing and wheeling courtship dance with the night-sleek Crown Jewel, and the heartbreaking, helpless panic of the two horses when the mare has foundered belly-deep in sucking mud-present unused possibilities of much greater suspense and excitement than the man-made climax of the trotting heats...