Word: ginning
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Perched atop placid howdah elephants and shaded by parasols, the royal guests lounged lazily in the hot jungle sun. Bar elephants circulated busily; from their backs, servants dispensed whisky, beer, martinis and gin-and-orange. Only the impatient tiger was uncomfortable. Queen Elizabeth refused to handle a gun, confined her shooting to a 16-mm. movie camera. The honor of being the "invited gun" was to have gone to Prince Philip, who during the royal family's tour of India and Pakistan has potted hundreds of duck and partridge, plus one sizable tiger, has been dubbed "the grim reaper...
...sisters' Muse. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and the lesser novels might never have been written if Branwell had not sparked his sisters' preteenage imaginations. Branwell himself reached manhood only to disintegrate. Ravaged by gin, opium, epilepsy, and an anguished sense of guilt, he died at 31. Branwell's own dying words might have been spoken by a more melancholy Sydney Carton: "In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good...
Wintering in Jamaica, T. S. Eliot and his wife Valerie, the plumply attractive Yorkshire lass he married four years ago, kept busy with nightly gin rummy, breezed through novels from the hotel library, daily ventured out in the midday sun. As he basked contentedly with his 34-year-old ex-secretary, the poet, at 72, looked not a little like the hero of his 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock...
Anyone who has suffered the pain and humiliation of having his ARETE cut from under him by a well-aimed charge of unresolved DICHOTOMY thrown in by a character loaded with gin and HUBRIS at a literary cocktail party ought to buy this splendidly written dictionary. Without being exactly a manual for the uncertain intellectual, it does live up to its blurb ("not only useful but enjoyable"). If a great many of the hundreds of terms seem Greek to the reader, the reason is that a great many of them are, for the Greeks were first in the study...
Many of his monologues are autobiographical "confessions." During Prohibition, on Chicago's West Side, he recalls tearfully, his Russian-born grandmother made bathtub gin to support the family, and one of Sheldon Berman's first memories is of being held by his mother (now dead) in a tight clutch of terror while police raided their home. His father Nathan was a tavern owner, and he appears, in one of Berman's best routines, as a militantly bourgeois delicatessen keeper who rough-talkingly tenders a chunk of his life savings so that his son can go to acting...