Word: etonic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...classmate, would later remember that Eric "felt bitterly that he was taken on at reduced fees because he might win the school a scholarship; he saw this as a humiliation, but it was really a compliment." The prickly youth did, in fact, earn a scholarship to Eton, winning praise for himself and his school. Yet his account of leaving St. Cyprian's hardly reflects a sense of triumph: "Failure, failure, failure-failure behind me, failure ahead of me-that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away...
...have felt like this at the time; an older man wrote these words in an essay, in a world drastically altered. But Eric's conduct at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way through 4½ years at the apex of English secondary education, growing tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells), contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or Cambridge without a scholarship...
...word in American English. This could be the main dilemma facing the redoubtable chronicler of Britain's titled nobility, Debrett's Peerage, which has set out to publish a ten-volume series on the American aristocracy. Debrett's editor, Martin Stansfeld, an untitled Scot who attended Eton and Oxford and whose family "goes back to the Normans," explains that the series will concentrate on "the glittering star system of America's social leadership...
...stars. Built mostly in the late 1920s, they are jewels of art deco crystal and cabinetwork. Some were discovered, rotted and unrecognizable, on remote railroad sidings. One had been used as a brothel in Limoges during World War II; another had been tenderly maintained by a schoolmaster at Eton. Each car had to be equipped with modern wiring, insulation, safety glass, fireproofing and brakes. Much of the marquetry and upholstery had to be remade, some of it to the original specifications, discovered, miraculously, at a cabinetmaker's in Chelmsford, England. Some 250 Orient Express artifacts, from bud vases...
...wiring of our consciences-the knowledge that in another year or two or three, almost any country with a backyard plutonium kit will be dealing in apocalypse. Despairing, we send our children back to their Atari and Intellivision electronic zapping games: those may be the playing fields of Eton...