Word: englandisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...blaspheme or curse God, or shall write or utter any profane words of and concerning our Saviour Jesus Christ, or of and concerning the Trinity, or any of the persons thereof." Similar statutes exist in half the states in the U.S. Most of them can be traced back to England and the 17th century, when penalties were harsh. In an early Maryland version of the law, first offenders had a hole bored through their tongues with a hot iron, second-timers had a "B" branded into their foreheads and anyone foolhardy enough to be caught the third time suffered death...
Other saints-like the Roman martyr Valentine, Bishop Nicholas of Myra (the original Santa Claus), England's patron St. George and Ireland's redoubtable St. Patrick-may still have mandatory feast days on national calendars but are now "optional" on the universal church calendar. Now mandatory on this worldwide calendar, however, are the feasts of such pointedly non-Caucasian saints as Paul Miki of Japan and the Martyrs of Uganda...
...slangy slumside talk. Teen-age talk particularly. Years before anyone else had noticed, Maclnnes stopped and listened to the English kids. Their songs and entire culture, he saw, were rocking out in accents more than half American. Years before the Beatles, he predicted (in the memorable essay "Young England, Half English") exactly what the Beatles would sound like and be like...
...Maclnnes' trio is City of Spades. Maclnnes was one of the first whites to say very loudly that black is beautiful; the light-heartedness of his evidence still rings out. When he brought a character named Johnny Fortune from Lagos to London twelve years ago, few people in England were thinking of racial tension or predicting an Enoch Powell. Maclnnes set Johnny and a white friend loose in an African and West Indian shadow world full of jouncing characters with cross-rough names: Mr. Peter Pay Paul, Mr. Karl Marx Bo (a future Prime Minister for sure), Mr. Ronson...
...life-style that included a listing in the Social Register and a spuriously noble family tree-an embellishment not unheard of in those days among Americans with pretensions. One of the Auchinclosses, John Davis notes, concocted a chart tracing the family's descent from the royal lines of England, Scotland and France...