Word: doorjamb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...questions members of McCarran's committee once fired at him with a characteristically Fairbankian sense of deadpan humor. But, as few who know him at all can fail to mention, Fairbank often compresses some of his most serious observations into what Thomson has called his "inscrutable wit." On the doorjamb of his wonderfully book-laden study in Widener, for instance, Fairbank has scrawled four words that are almost Chinese in their terseness: "People sometimes; book, never," the door reads. Fairbank's humorous but decidedly cynical meaning squeezed between the lines here is, as translated by Thomson, that while people...