Word: greek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then, to fit its letters, turning out an often fatuous full title. Examples: WAIF (Women's Adoption International Fund...
...first player elected to baseball's Hall of Fame (he received 222 votes to 215 for Babe Ruth), Cobb was a superb athlete. But, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, he had a fatal flaw: his compulsion to win was too strong. Cantankerous and mean, he was heartily hated by his Tiger teammates-particularly during his six-year hitch (1921-26) as player-manager-and got involved in countless brawls. He fought a bloody battle with Umpire George Moriarity, once stormed the New York grandstand to attack a crippled heckler. His two marriages ended in bitterness and divorce...
Died. George Criticos. 77, Greek-born friend of royalty and porter to the famous for more than 45 years at London's Ritz Hotel, who in 1932 chaperoned the then 21-year-old Aly Khan on a three-month American junket, and later moonlighted as his bet runner, placing more than $700,000 on the horses during the prince's last 27 years; of heart attack; in London. Criticized Criticos in his autobiography: "Millionaires are not usually very happy people, I have found. They're too full of worries about their wealth and health...
...sense whatever the 'rough,' 'eccentric,' 'vagabond' or queer person that the commentators persist in making him . . . always bodily sweet & fresh, dressed plainly & cleanly, a gait & demeanor of antique simplicity ... an American Personality, & real Democratic Presence, that not only the best old Hindu, Greek and Roman worthies would at once have responded to, but which the most cultured European would likewise...
First of all, let's leave ancient history out of this. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the playwright is not confronting us with those noble Greek and Trojan warriors that Homer and others sang of. The proper names are retained--Priam, Hector, Aeneas, Achilles, Ulysses, and the rent--but any further resemblances are purely coincidental. Cressida does not even exist in the Illad; and the sagittarial hero-god Pandarus was not debased into a pimp until Boccaccio latched onto...