Word: genteelisms
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...free bin. He sleeps in an abandoned house or in the Berkeley hills, and he doesn't get sick. And, of course, Joseph has to eat. One night I asked him where he ate if he didn't eat at the food project meal. Some of the more genteel street people prefer "scarfing" or "vulching" (an invented verb form of "vulture"), which consists of waiting inconspicuously in a restaurant until a customer finishes and then beating the busboy to the plates of leftovers. But this method doesn't work for Joseph, who looks too hungry to go by unnoticed. Instead...
Former President Gerald Ford, 70, whose life seems to be dogged by minor mishaps, has a knack for turning even the genteel game of golf into a hazardous sport. At the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am tournament in Pebble Beach, Calif., all was going well for Ford and his partner, Jack Nicklaus, 44, until they reached the 15th tee. There, Ford hooked a shot that traveled 90 yards and bopped a woman spectator squarely on the head. The unlucky lady was knocked down, and Ford's round was delayed for 30 minutes as medics administered sympathy and stitches. Ford...
...turn of the century, Back Bay was all genteel opulence and social superiority, magnificently expressed by Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church and McKim, Mead & White's public library on Copley Square. In the 1950s the area began to slide into a comfortable shabbiness. Most of the grand houses were converted into private schools, dormitories and offices, or divided into small apartments and rooming houses. Shops proliferated. In 1965 the clumsy 52-story-high Prudential Center rose incongruously on Boylston Street. It was followed by the 60-story mirror-glass John Hancock tower and other tall buildings. This...
...world's most polished light versifiers, Coward (1899-1973) and his friend and contemporary Cole Porter (1893-1964). The men would seem as different as Piccadilly and Park Avenue. Coward's family took in boarders and lived in London on the edge of genteel poverty. The stage became young Noël's Oxford and Cambridge; he was a professional actor at twelve and England's Neil Simon at 25, when four of his plays ran simultaneously in the West End. Porter was born wealthy and attended Yale and Harvard. His first Broadway show lasted...
...then took up with his unhappily married father Austin, a grizzled 53, treasurer of the college, older brother of Emily Dickinson and pillar of respectability. "I love you, and I want you bitterly," Mabel wrote to Dickinson. Her husband seems to have been remarkably tolerant, and so was the genteel society of Amherst. When Dickinson died in 1895, nobody was surprised that Mabel kissed what she called "the dear body, every inch of which I know and love so utterly...