Word: guttered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hard, Gemlike Flame. Many of the new esthetes determinedly marked themselves off from the crowd by what seemed to them the highest forms of both self-indulgence and self-martyrdom. They nourished what they chose to call nostalgie de la boue - "the longing for the gutter." Paul Verlaine, the outstanding poet of his day, was a diseased, perverted dipsomaniac who "wrapped his suppurating limbs ... in vile rags," lived off the earnings of prostitutes, and alternated between "maudlin ferocity [and] mawkish repentance." Accused of being decadent, he replied: "I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. ... It suggests...
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...
...that was certain to remain after 1,000 years was the all but incredible story of the demonic little man who rose through the grating of a gutter to make himself absolute master of-most of Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th-century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power...
Argentine dopesters figured his chances, quickly decided that Perón, in trying to leap from bandwagon to bandwagon, might very well land in the gutter. Few believed he could win more than 10% of the votes in a fair election. But Argentine democrats were uneasy, suspecting a booby trap. From the provinces came reports that pamphlets praising Perón were flying thick as snowflakes. Handkerchiefs, buttons and mate gourds displayed his manly portrait. The Strong Man's "democratic" campaign was already under...
...chatter of starlings, gulls circling over the city. "Only the people scurrying along the streets looked dead and gray and driven. They were warmly dressed, they looked well fed, but still as they passed by they looked helpless and fragile and faceless as dry leaves, blown along the gutter by a gust of wind. It's tough on people to live in a time of too many changes, I was thinking...