Word: feathering
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Jean Tousseul's Jean Clarambaux (Lippincott, $3) is a long, gentle, nostalgic, sentimental novel of life in a Belgian hamlet before and during the German occupation of 1914-18. Though written with no little art, it has the warm, excessive, disconcerting and soporific sweetness of a bottomless feather...
Soon it appears that what was intended as an absolutely honest autobiography has turned into a fearlessly candid biography of his wife. A social worker, lecturer and minor fiction writer, Edith was not (as Daudet said the wife of a writer should be) a feather bed. Petite, restless, intense, she scolded at Havelock's manners, dress, undemonstrativeness, called him a mixture of satyr and Christ, alternated between tantrums and protestations of undying love. "The worst of me is in my tongue," she reassured him, but once she kicked him in the head. He discovered strong homosexual tendencies...
...break the tedium of a march by challenging his companions to outjump him. He liked to dance with female camp followers around the campfire, would break off abruptly to dictate (in Spanish, French or English) his fast, polished sentences to a secretary. He pardoned his venal aides, refused to feather his own nest, praised his generals unstintedly. He deliberately resigned as Supreme Chief in order to discourage dictatorship...
...Hollywood went Michael O'Daniel, 19, son of Texas' Governor Wilbert Lee ("Pass the Biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel, to make his fortune with his face. After a screen test he was offered a contract by Paramount, went home in high feather to get his pappy's consent...
That each generation of undergraduates should exercise its prerogative to tar and feather the teaching staff -- typographically speaking--is a healthy thing, and the most recent essay in that direction, Mr. Bunde's philippic in the Progressive, manifests unusual insight not only into problems of pedagogy but into the larger question of a university's true function. Mr. Bunde, by and large, has done a good job, but the effectiveness of his criticism is blunted by over-indulgence in harsh and intemperate personalisms. There are ways of getting at the same end without resorting to personal abuse...