Word: farb
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...biggest closet may belong to Carolyn Farb. ex-wife of a Houston real estate tycoon, who has devoted six rooms to the care and storage of her $750,000-plus wardrobe. Among Hollywood closet queens, Zsa Zsa Gabor probably reigns supreme with a system that "many people say is bigger than Paramount's wardrobe department." Charlotte Ford hired New York Expert Mario Buatta to design her new closet with printed fabric resembling Matisse motifs, but she still hangs an overflow elsewhere in the apartment. In another Buatta supercloset. Author Hannah Pakula has installed a chaise longue, an exercise machine...
Says Linguistics Scholar Peter Farb in Word Play: "Something happened in evolution to create Man the Talker." And a talker man remains, with speech his most exalting faculty. Talk is the tool, the toy, the comfort and joy of the human species. The pity is that talkers so often blurt so far beyond the line of what is needed and desired that they have to be listened to with a stiff upper...
Animals feed; humans eat. And the process of eating defines cultures and personalities. As the late Peter Farb and his collaborator George Armelagos indicate, "Food and drink have such intense emotional significance that they are often linked with events that have nothing to do with nutrition. The perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party were angry not over tea but over taxation; the breadline and apple-sellers of the Great Depression became symbols of what was wrong with the economy . . . the civil-rights movement . . . during the 1950s began as a dispute about the right of blacks not simply...
...champion pedants in any language, he says, turn out to be heavy users of slang. Adolescents, applying slang to test "who belongs to the group and who is an intruder," are, Farb contends, "more severe about standards for its correct usage" than the fussiest schoolmarm...
...champion scatologists, he argues, are Germans, who tend to roll in the aisles after the first hint of a comic's outhouse smirk. Is martinet toilet training the explanation? Farb wonders but never decides...