Word: flapper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ferment. The nation had half forgotten the kind of convulsions with which it had been seized in the years after World War I. The U.S. had not only been hellbent to shake off the past, but full of a kind of callow hunger for sensation. The flapper who bobbed her hair, bound her breasts and wore knee-length skirts was almost duty-bound to get "blotto" by drinking gin from hip flasks. "I want to live my own life," cried the '20's movie heroine, and millions tried to imitate her. Literature was full of ferment, religion...
...read, however, as a social document, The Pleasures of the Jazz Age has the same kind of interest as a report on mating customs of ancient Egyptians. Here the reader can find such characteristic creatures of the jazz age as the hot & cold flapper ("There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry") described in the elegant, slightly elegiac prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald; the frat boys going through their rituals as if life itself depended on them ("every night a freshman stood on the roof of the Nu Delta house and announced...
...Frederick Lewis Allen has proved, the age of only yesterday, and the day before, is already history and ripe for retelling. .There is even gold to be found in ransacking the closets of the 19205-the era of the flapper and the grimacing mobster, the devotees of sex dives and bathtub gin, the frilly esthetes and champions of companionate marriage. William Hodapp has pasted together, with some success, an anthology reflecting the era through its fiction. The stories provide dramatic evidence of how drastically and quickly the patterns of U.S. life can change during a lifetime...
...seasonal pairings are as familiar to the public as Stan Musial's batting average. There were soubrettes who had not been heard from since Julia Marlowe played Juliet. The once-famed Duncan sisters were there. Fanny Ward, who made a living for years as "the 60-year-old flapper," was trying to look a youthful 76 in an outfit that combined a bridal gown and a Baby Snooks nightshirt...
According to Skaarup and Winther, a bobby-soxer is a flapper; ladies' undies are called twilights; a drizzle is a boy who always walks with the same girl; and when you say attaboy, you mean either bravo, get at it again, or a member of an air transport auxiliary corps. After consulting the dictionary, Danes would have no trouble following the English dialogue of such Hollywood hits as Himlen kan vente (Heaven Can Wait), might tackle the best-selling Der gror et Trae i Brooklyn in the original...