Word: elocutionist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...caustic Santayana, Charles Townsend Copeland was a mere "elocutionist" who provided a "spiritual debauch [for] many well-disposed waifs at Harvard." Copey's well-disposed waifs felt otherwise. A shrunken little man, with an actor's sense of staging, he brought literature to life for thousands of students. When the announcement went up for one of his readings, students would line the streets outside his hall. Then Copey would enter, order the doors to be locked, spend minutes adjusting his lamp, listen disdainfully for the audience to swallow its coughs, and finally begin. Over the years, those readings...
There he sat at table with a broken-down laboratory assistant, a lavender college student, a mousy-genteel kleptomaniac widow, a moth-eaten elocutionist, a stale bibliophile who dismissed all ideas with "forgive my sense of humor"—a gallery which should convince almost everybody that Wells, like Dickens, is no caricaturist of English life but a dispenser of literal and horrifying truth. And there Teddy ran foul of two "overripe virgins," bleached Miss Blame and malapropist Miss Birkenhead, who once spent six months in Paris, calls her Paris sugar daddy her faux...