Word: genteelness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. John Betjeman, 77, poet laureate of Britain whose whimsical light verse and nostalgic odes to genteel Edwardian England won him uncommon popular success; in Trebetherick, Cornwall. The son of a prosperous businessman, Betjeman flunked out of Oxford and worked in a variety of jobs, from journalist to insurance salesman, before his Selected Poems (1948) won the prestigious Heinemann Award. Critics were divided on Betjeman's poetry; many found it trivial or derivative, perhaps because of its simple musical rhymes and accessible themes. An astute architectural critic, he waged passionate campaigns to preserve England's historical treasures...
...same time, investment banking is losing its old, genteel overtones of Ivy League colleges and gentlemen's social clubs. Companies have got more fickle and change bankers with greater frequency. Says Felix Rohatyn of Lazard Freres, who built his reputation as a deal-maker during the 1960s: "Relationships are no longer as important as individual transactions. There is simply not the amount of long-term trust between clients and their investment bankers that there once...
Living in genteel poverty-"Russian pathos," Rilke called it-Balthus and his mother limped from one exile to another: Berlin, Geneva, Berlin again, and finally, in 1924, back to Paris...
...court judges. In 1982 there were six times as many privately arranged adoptions-many of them made by non-residents-as placements made through the state's official adoption agency. To some, the situation has turned Charleston into a notorious baby bazaar; to others, it has made the genteel city a welcome haven for couples anxious to secure a child...
...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...