Word: gutter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wardrobe): a bowler hat whose brim turned down. Wrote he: "The hat possesses a classic (or dome-of-St. Paul's) crown, five inches high but unwaisted, but the brim, which is a full two and a half inches wide, is perfectly flat save for an inverted gutter at the extreme edge.... I am wondering if it is an example of individual taste...
Later, one Frederick Willis, an Edwardian survivor who accredited himself as "an old silk-hatter familiar with all the Great Hats of a great age," set the record straight: "The specimen ... is of the period of 1907 to 1914. The inverted pipe curl (not gutter, as stated) was conceived, not by a madman . . . but by a master born out of his time, like Picasso. He visualized a market of individualists, and his vision was inspired by deep study of 18th-Century social history. Unfortunately the vanguard of standardized man was already overrunning England, the last stronghold of the individualist...
Only the practical G.B.S. would think of raising an Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter by correcting her gutturals. Only the paradoxical G.B.S. would suggest how much more insecure she is when bediamonded than when she was bedraggled. Only the perverse G.B.S. would select a gruff, self-centered, confirmed-bachelor of a phonetics professor for a fairy prince. But even Shaw leaves the door open for a fairy-tale ending...
...simply a weapon with which to fight complacency. In 1891, at 24, she married a Berlin doctor, helped finance his clinic by selling harrowing studies of the kind of people who came to him as patients. Kaiser Wilhelm II called her stuff "the art of the gutter," in 1898 canceled a gold medal award which was to have been given her. She bitterly opposed World War I, and skillfully recorded its ugly aftermath in Germany. The Nazis stopped her from exhibiting, but she kept right on working, turned to sculpture when her eyes dimmed. She only changed her weapons; what...
Imitations of the authentic French originals sprang up in England like dubious mushrooms- gutter lovers, Beau Brummels, professional sensualists, practical jokers, drug fiends. Mildest, most influential apostle of the new, sensuous estheticism was Oxford's Walter Pater. As a child, he had loved to don a surplice and "preach sermons to his admiring Aunt Betty." As a youth, he had avoided horse play ("I do not seem to want a black eye"). As a professor, he coined a famed phrase when he solemnly urged his students "to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame." "Oh, for Crime!" But most...