Word: curmudgeon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among the many shortcomings of literary life in the U.S. is its lack of a mean old man. There are plenty of lovable old men-Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller-but no old curmudgeon who clubs young reporters with a tongue like a blackthorn stick and sends them scurrying back to their editors filled with terror and fine quotes. It is a grievous lack. Almost every other part of U.S. society has had such a man: the House of Representatives had its Uncle Joe Cannon, the tobacco industry its George Washington Hill, labor its John L. Lewis and baseball...
Like an old-curmudgeon predecessor named Harold Ickes (1933-46), Interior's Udall has made lots of news-much of it unwelcome. As an Arizona Congressman, he earned John Kennedy's gratitude-and, presumably, his present Cabinet position-by his effective 1960 preconvention work for Kennedy in the Southwest. No sooner had he taken over his Cabinet office than he allowed as how Democratic Congressmen had better go along with the Kennedy Administration's effort to liberalize the House Rules Committee or lose their bite at the Interior Department's pork-barrel appropriations; this sort...
...wrong"), heartily belabors "the child-overwhelmed culture," trenchantly elucidates the principle of "negative cheerfulness" ("One statistician not long ago tried to cheer us all with his estimate that only 18 million people, not 50 million, would be killed here in a nuclear war"). He bristles with useless information ("Curmudgeon seems to derive from the French coeur mé-chant") and daffy definitions. At one point he supplies a graceful homemade nursery rhyme...
Sharp-tongued, curmudgeon-like though I am, I never said that some 20,000 fine voters in the 29th N.Y. Congressional District "every four years crawl out of their Hudson Gothic woodwork to vote for William McKinley." The crawling-out-of-woodwork metaphor was an added touch by the New York Times writer; he had an unusually fine prose style, given to flourishes which, as he might put it, bode well for a career in journalism. I did remark, sadly, how certain voters up here seem to pledge fealty every four years to William McKinley, but just...
...China's militancy-that one Communist nation is as peace-loving as can be. Red China seemed to be a subject that host and guest were anxious to avoid. When Sukarno wondered aloud why Asians would not be present at the summit. Khrushchev, obviously uneasy that his curmudgeon ally, Red China, might be the one to demand a seat most loudly, remarked: "Maybe the time is not yet ripe to arrange a more representative summit conference...