Word: demigod
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...generation of jazz-age iconoclasts, Mencken was a demigod who cut down false idols with a meatax. He fought the censors and prohibitors like an enraged impala, and destroyed shibboleths with a whimsical delight that has seldom been equaled. On his overheated typewriter he minted words and phrases that became part of the national currency: "booboisie," "bozart," "Comstockery," "Bible Belt." With roars of laughter, Mencken insulted at least half his countrymen as "morons" and "boobs" led by "medicine men." He enraged a lot of people, and capitalized on their anger by fielding their barbs into an anthology, Schimpflexikon...
...entourage, the maid recalled, consisted of a male secretary and a valet-bodyguard. Since Churchill had a bad cold, the valet instructed the maid to get two dozen handkerchiefs, each a yard square and imported from the British Isles. Wrote the colonel's lady: "Churchill was really a demigod to this fellow . . . This cocky detective said that Mr. Churchill had the mind of the century and there was nothing that he did not know or could not understand...
...Neill's own version of George F. Babbitt is William A. Brown. He appeared for the first time in The Great God Brown (on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theater in 1926), an outwardly happy businessman ("the visionless demigod of our new materialistic myth-a Success"). His antagonist is an artistic soul both envied and victimized by Brown. The artistic soul cries out: "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am L. afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh...
...invention." Her plight in a man-made world is summed up in two of Author de Beauvoir's characteristically sweeping statements: 1) "The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation," and 2) "The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women...
Among the most striking statues in the exhibition was a Nara-period lacquer of the demigod Karura, one of the legendary protectors of Shakamuni Buddha. His unknown craftsman visualized him as looking a good deal like an ancient warrior, with stern glance, hanging jowls and a suit of mail-but distinguished from ordinary mortals by a belligerently bird-like beak...