Word: gaffe
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...letters reveal how much time Hemingway was left alone with his writing. It was the one thing that he could not charm, intimidate, tame with fists, gun or gaff. Early comments on the subject jumble jazz-age slang with such gee whizzisms as "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers" and "Pound thinks I'm a swell poet." The mature craftsman finds that he has to write to be happy, that his art is his disease, his vice and obsession...
...scene. Anyone who has spent time on the sea knows that nothing, in terms of observation, is missing from his images of Truro on Cape Cod, like The Martha McKean of Wellfleet, 1944. From the humping blue of the water to the mild sun on the belly of the gaff-rigged sail, it is all there, immemorial, as permanent as the way the gulls face into the light...
...never really been a wholehearted step forward. So it was that on a bright, late-summer day, farmers, fishermen and their families-6,000 of them in all-flocked to the ramshackle Wallace Shipyards in Thomaston (pop. 2,500) to cheer "that Ackerman boy" as his new two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner slid down the ways and eased majestically into the clean waters of the St. George River, exactly as hundreds of schooners used to do before steamboats, trucks and trains put most of them out of business more than half a century...
...most of all we were interested in this Jack Guy guy. Frankly, we didn't believe he existed, except as an advertising model. Imagine them inventing this old guy "Guy." And all the gaff it tossed around about his starting the toy line: "Back in the 1950s, Jack Guy got concerned because the art of making folk toys was disappearing from his native Blue Ridge Mountains..." The publicity went on to talk about how the toys had now spread throughout the country and even into some "furrin'" countries. (A few paragraphs later they say there were some sold in "foreign...
...that in the Olympic year of 1972 some 65 of the world's largest windjammers closed a series of races by parading into the harbor of Kiel, West Germany. The book ends with a catalogue of boats that took part-square-riggers with skyscrapers of sail, brigantines, Dutch gaff cutters, topsail schooners. In between there is nothing but glorious pictures of tall ships, webbed traceries of cordage, acre upon acre of canvas, panoramas showing the vast fleet dotting troubled waters, symmetrical silhouettes of crews aloft on yardarms, looking like Chinese gymnasts, bringing in sail. The same great ships appear...