Word: gargantuan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the subject of a debate at Groton School became the subject of a difference between two New York columnists. In this corner, Gargantuan, dandy Lucius Beebe, who amiably considers Groton U. S. Educational Institution No. 1 because it stands at the top of the private school social scale. In that corner, Gargantuan, dowdy Heywood Broun, whose funny-bone never tingles pleasantly over reactionary boarding schools...
...great private collections surviving in America,* Mr. Hearst's hoard of treasure is probably the most heterogeneous ever amassed by one man. Collector Hearst began in 1891 with English Staffordshire furniture and continued for 47 years to gorge a Gargantuan appetite for possessions. Housed at San Simeon, at Sands Point, L. I., in Manhattan, at St. Donat's and in the Hearst warehouses, his hodgepodge includes thousands of pieces of furniture, tapestries, armor, and hundreds of paintings including a few estimable Bouchers, Van Dycks, Rembrandts. Corrected by precise Agent Parish-Watson last week was the New Yorker...
Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus' gorilla Gargantua the Great, wrote Gargantuan Columnist Heywood Broun three weeks ago, "is the fiercest looking thing I have ever seen on two legs. And probably his power and truculence were all the more impressive because he did look a good deal like a distant relative. No one was allowed to go close to his cage, because Gargantua can reach about five feet through the bars and get a toe hold on a visitor whom he dislikes." Gargantua may not be the world's biggest captive gorilla-since the death of Berlin...
Diamond Jim Brady, who thought nothing of downing a few dozen oysters as an appetizer for a 15-course dinner, was during his lifetime as famed as a salesman as he was as a gastrophile. If his stomach was gargantuan, his entertainment expenses and the sales that followed were epic. The Brady fable got its pith from Charles A. Moore, founder of Manning, Maxwell & Moore, who took Brady on as a cub salesman in 1879 when the company was only a jobber for railroad supplies, sent Diamond Jim out on the road with instructions to spend all the money necessary...
...things amuse the Australians. One was a comedian named George K. Fortescue. A massive man, he paced the boards in an opéra bouffe of the 90s wearing a gargantuan pink ballet skirt edged with pompons, roaring out feminine lines in full bass. So thoroughly did he delight the fun-loving citizens of Sydney, they gave him an indigenous and characteristic present: a robe made from 80 pelts of the weird duckbill, or platypus. There seems to have been none like it before or since...