Word: gaume
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Through all the hullabaloo moves O'Casey himself, an ex-laborer who burns with a hot, proletarian fire. He is poor as a church mouse and still, at 35, such "innocent gaum" (dumbbell) that when he gets a check for one of his first plays he doesn't know how to go about cashing it. But he is sustained by wonderful dreams and illusions in which he sees Ireland peopled by "golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth...
...innocent gaum O'Casey woke up with a bump to find that most people were clay after all. When his proletarian plays were staged by Dublin's Abbey Theater, many critics hissed maliciously and poets looked nervously the other way. Even pioneers, O'Casey discovered, fear public opinion; even democrats get a kick out of wearing striped pants and top hats; even noble esthetes enjoy walking with one foot in the gutter. Sean was shocked to find that stately, plump Oliver St. John Gogarty surreptitiously read whodunits ; that refined Lady Gregory reveled...
...attempt to make it a second Tobacco Road, a sociological study of the hardy and poverty-ridden Anglo-Saxons of North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountain country. So esoteric is the idiom that a glossary is included with the program. "Swivvetty" means nervous; "upscuddle," quarrel; "hippin," diaper; "gaum," disorder; "furriner," any outsider...
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