Word: genuflect
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...advance and custom-made. Upperclassmen eat in baronial halls, may sit under imposing chandeliers or by an imported Burgundian fireplace, use silver sugar bowls. Yale's Divinity School looks as if it might have been moved up from Williamsburg; the university library looks like a cathedral ("Must I genuflect?" a bemused visitor once exclaimed); its main power plant is clothed in stone to look like a Gothic tower...
Once they asked the ambassador to kowtow before the figure of a dragon; the imperial emblem. This struck the Occidentals as an Oriental trick that would somehow signify their subservience. Amherst offered to do so if a mandarin of equal rank would genuflect before a portrait of the British sovereign. "Inadmissible!" snapped the Chinese. Amherst played the idea a bit further. He would kowtow to the Emperor if it were guaranteed that any Chinese ambassador in London would make similar obeisance to the English throne. "Impossible!" snorted the mandarins...
...inane inclination of the average American to ... almost genuflect at the presence of a European title, phony or otherwise," snarled Sinclair Lewis, "is, to my mind ... a pathetic demonstration of sycophants. ... I wish the British would test our ridiculous national sub servience by offering a few of their hollow titles in the American open market . . . just to see who would leap at the chance to buy one." Columnist Elsa Maxwell reported that Author John Gunther (Inside U.S.A.) had told her he was reading Thucydides' Peloponnesian War "to learn all about modern politics and modern war." Added Elsa: "Maybe...
This literary descendant of the Master deserves the nostalgic sighs his exploits will bring from most died-in-the-red Baker Street Irregulars. Readers who do not genuflect before No. 7 will note that Detective Pons shares his prototype's shortcomings along with his virtues: his puzzles aren't always puzzling and his Dr. Watson is more ponderously thick headed than is absolutely necessary. Ver dict: good...
...play is rich in more than one kind of name-calling. Before the wheelchair genuflect the world's great. "Gertrude Stein" phones from Paris. "Admiral Byrd" sends penguins, "William Beebe" an octopus. "Harpo Marx" arrives for a cyclonic visit. "Noel Coward" whizzes by, stopping long enough to play a "new song" of his, a howling burlesque all about...