Word: figs
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...world, he held Kenya in such affection that he kept Mount Kenya as his favorite resting place. He told Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, that if difficulty ever arose, Gikuyu should make a sacrifice and raise a hand toward Mount Kenya, and Ngai would help. Not far away, under a fig tree, Gikuyu found a beautiful woman, Moombi, to be mother of the Kikuyu race. Later, when their nine beautiful daughters needed husbands, Gikuyu sacrificed a lamb and a kid under a fig tree, smeared their blood on its bark, faced Mount Kenya, and saw his daughters' wishes come true...
...Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms...
...daughter has a lover's quarrel with Yacky Doo. Pettishly she steals the priceless Burns manuscript, then gets drunk and loses it-or so it appears. Soon, throughout Edinburgh, copies of the verses are falling like fig leaves. The barometer of conventional morality falls dangerously too. Everyone burns but few marry; Arbuthnot himself corners a young wench in his office, and clerks on the floor below watch anxiously as plaster flakes off the ceiling...
...caused the entire Albuquerque Rotary Club to walk out on him; in Manhattan. Fiske made pretentious women his special target (Queen Anne, Miss Elaine of Boston, Gretchen Goudonofi, Malaga the Grape Girl), but he was also unkind to Marc Antony ("Cleopatra thought this was so swell / She had the Fig Newtons passed around, / Which only gave Marc Antony a case of hiccups / She misconstrued this for emotion...
...middle culture is mass culture with a fig leaf," he continued, "While it pleases a crowd, it has high cultural pretensions." MacDonald cited the Saturday Review, Herman Wouk's novels, J.B., and his own New Yorker as examples of "midcult...