Word: houyhnhnm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Lemuel Gulliver, a great traveler, once came upon a nation of horses called Houyhnhnms (pronounced, with a whinny, who-in-ums), who were gifted with sound reason and a noble spirit, and ruled benevolently over an unprepossessing tribe of humans called yahoos. A British stable owner named Frank Coton felt he had a near-Houyhnhnm in his eight-year-old gelding, Black Diamond. One day last week, he led Black Diamond clopping into a Nottingham movie theater (which had been cleared of yahoos); the horse, perspiring heavily, watched as a newsreel of 1952's Grand National Steeplechase...
...purely literary essays are bound by a common thread of dislike for those excesses of thought, even the excesses of such greats as Tolstoy and Swift, which fringe on totalitarian fanaticism. In two brilliant essays he shows how scorn and lack of pity led Swift to portray the ideal Houyhnhnm society as a soulless mechanism, and how Tolstoy's harsh morality blinded him to the truth of Shakespeare's tragedies...
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