Word: haruspex
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Reading Harriman's 1956 budget message, Republican Heck suddenly leaped to his feet and cried: "Haruspex!" Some of his associates thought of answering "Gesundheit," but others quietly went to the dictionary. Heck soon had Albany reporters flipping through Webster's, after he and Senate Majority Leader Walter Mahoney issued a statement that said, in part: "If, as Governor Harriman seems to infer, Republican clairvoyance was required last year to determine that he did not need the $127 million tax increase which he demanded, our forecast has proven far more accurate than the divinations of the Democrat haruspex, which...
...reporters soon found out, were diviners, usually Etruscans, who deduced the will of the gods and foretold the future chiefly by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals, from birds to bulls. With a word, Speaker Heck had at last aroused public interest in the $127 million error of Haruspex Harriman...
...list of 615 words, had to call time out while they scrabbled in their dictionaries for more stickers. Imprimatur, encomium, umbrage, charlatan and eident eliminated all but three. In Round 29, Jim Bernhard, 12, of Houston, Texas, who had plowed successfully through such words as effluviography, went down on haruspex (he ended it specs). Only plump, wavy-haired Diana Reynard, 12, of East Cleveland, Ohio, and pale, lanky Colquitt Dean, 14, of College Park, Ga., were left...