Word: fig
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moldy fig (jive)-a pedant
Webster is a moldy fig. For all its scholarship, the supposedly unabridged dictionary (600,000 entries) gives hardly a hint that the American language is in the grip of a permanent revolution. The Websterian ideal of language as a careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate. Professors may still protest, but the public -and most authorities-tends to silence them. Says one philologist: "It was once thought that most slang came from the underworld, but nowadays a great deal of it comes...
Director Billy Wilder, fresh off the boat from Europe and without a bean in his pocket, picked up his first salary check in Hollywood by hiring out as a stunt man and jumping into a swimming pool in full fig. Since that day, he has splashed about so energetically in the cinema swim that now he is established beyond question as one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters, as a director who ranks with George Stevens (The Diary of Anne Frank), William Wyler (Ben Hur) and Fred Zinneman (A Nun's Story) in the Big Four...
...spring his small bones are found near by. No matter: word arrives that another cousin is coming. It all sounds like an insane parody of bedroom farce, but Playwright Sagan wrote it with skill, wit and a minor wisdom as dry as an eight-year-old fig leaf. Virtually all the critics, including hoary Academician Frangois Mauriac, praised Chateau. Dissenters could point to an occasional over-cleverness and seize on one of Sagan's lines for their text. "Intelligence has become a terrible thing in our time," notes one character, perhaps speaking of the author. "It torments...
...University, describes the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick as "homoerotic"-a case of "innocent homosexuality." Written in that vein, Love and Death in the American Novel is a tumid, quasi-psychoanalytic study in which Critic Fiedler tries to strip American literature down to a heavily annotated fig leaf. As Fiedler sees it, the fig leaf conceals guilt and impotence, the historical inability of the U.S. novelist to portray mature women or deal with adult hetero sexual relationships...