Word: hooch
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...into his Jolly Toper (opposite). The Toper (which remarkably resembles Actor Van Heflin in the role of Athos of the Three Musketeers) has the eyes and mouth of any man on the higher slopes of inebriation. If universality was Hals's hallmark, particularity was that of Pieter de Hooch. Not one artist working today could make a tennis match on a Westchester estate, for example, come as alive as De Hooch's Game of Skittles...
Game of Skittles. Instead of outstripping his time like Rembrandt, or capturing it like De Hooch, Jan Vermeer distilled it. Vermeer's pictures are even cooler, steadier and more meticulous than the customers called for. As Curator Theodore Rousseau remarks in the exhibition catalogue, almost everything Vermeer painted has a "quality of classical repose and silence. It remains one of the inexplicable puzzles in the history of taste that [Vermeer's pictures] have been confused with works by other artists, and that the identity of this painter, who to us seems different from all others, should have been...
Though they had speed and blare at times as well as sappiness, those musicals were in general the ladyfingers of an age of hooch. The scene of The Boy Friend is a British-flavored bit of the Riviera, the romance is between two frightfully rich young things (Julie Andrews and John Hewer) who represent themselves to each other as awfully poor. "I could be happy with you," they duet, "if you could be happy with me." Between whiles, girls wearing frocks with waistlines near their shins mince about squealing genteel idiocies ; everybody makes remarks of a piercing obviousness; couples tango...
Borrowing & Inventing. Hundreds of Americanisms, Mathews found, grew out of other languages. English-speaking settlers in the Spanish Southwest turned estampida into stampede, vamos into vamoose, and calabozo into calaboose. Alaskan settlers corrupted a powerful drink of the Hutsnuwu Indians into hooch, changed hiu muckamuck, the Chinook words meaning "plenty to eat," into a high-muck-a-muck, a "person of importance." From the German gunsmiths of Pennsylvania came rifle, probably out of riffel, the word for groove. The Dutch produced koekje (cookies); and their word for dung-pappekak-eventually turned into poppycock...
...Jersey boy, I will never be able to drive through Allendale again without the thought of that quintet standing like the boys used to stand in front of the roadhouses along the Jersey shore, flush with the success of another load of hooch ashore the previous night, while an obliging cohort snapped their picture...