Word: grub
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...forbears. I probably wouldn't be hard for most of us to put ourselves out for the court by doing mortal damage to a couple of geese or an eighth of a cow, but even our Victorian friends would turn their noses up at such paltry quantities of grub. And to get a true idea of the real spirit of Christmas, (or any holiday for that matter) you've got to go further back, back to times when eating was a full time occupation...
Freelancing has never been the gentlest of callings. Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary immortalized the ink-stained wretches who lived on London's Grub Street turning out literary piecework. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," said Dr. Johnson, who nonetheless spent most of his life in poverty. In the platinum age of periodicals, roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, it was possible for man to live by word alone, provided he sold it to a magazine. The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Collier's, LIFE, Woman's Home Companion and Coronet routinely...
...backlot growers cannot afford soaring prices for fertilizers, fungicides and equipment. Except in Central America and Mexico, where the coffee pickers are in short supply, the lot of the hired worker has not improved. In Brazil, laborers known as bóias frias (literal translation: cold grub) still get less than $2.73 for a full day of picking coffee berries, no more than before prices rose-though some have made enough profit to retire for the rest of their lives...
Nudging Nature. On another level, many Americans were working shorter hours and looking for something new and personally satisfying to do in their leisure hours. Astonishing numbers of them seemed to be finding it in an almost atavistic yearning to grub in the dirt, sow seeds, nudge nature with fertilizer, watch wondrous things grow, then literally taste the fruits-and vegetables-of their loving labors at their own tables. Home gardening of all kinds, but most especially for eating, is booming in the U.S. The growing zest for growing things got its biggest boost in 1974 from the recession, climbing...
...Europe and the U.S. has been molded by the incessant pressure of propaganda about art as a commodity: by museums which flaunt their directorial machismo by advertising the prices of their million-dollar acquisitions; by witless journalists whose only peg for discussing art is its price; by collectors who grub for investment; and by the horde of dealers, ranging from the little sharks to the dignified auction-room gents with faces like silver teapots, who have striven to give art the primary function of bullion. The present epidemic of art theft is ultimately their responsibility. In one day last week...