Word: humbug
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...professional educator," Dean Simpson said last week. "But I do know an educated man when I see one, and I shall try to see that we turn out that kind of student-namely, one free of cant and humbug. The ordinary American boy who will only make a million in later life, the ordinary girl who wants a husband as well as a diploma, are as welcome here as the Quiz...
...Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts a barbed disenchantment in her lines that neatly deflates humbug and windbag alike. But she carries her tragic life more like extra luggage than a cross...
...Humbug or Healer? To his fine gallery of free men-Gully Jimson in The Horse's Mouth, Chester Nimmo in Prisoner of Grace-Cary has added the Rev. Walter Preedy. In this hollow-chested, egotistical evangelist, the sense of God is like a torment. His specialty is faith healing. To him and to his followers in the London suburb of Pant's Road, it is blasphemy to call a doctor, for that is an admission that God is incapable of miracles. Preedy seems to have worked quite a few miracles himself, and his fame is spreading. This...
Ranged against him is the Rev. Mr. Syson of nearby St. Enoch's. Syson is a World War II flying hero whose Anglican orthodoxy is correct and painless. Most of his parishioners agree with him that Preedy is a humbug, but Preedy's miracles, performed in public, have convinced a few. Syson sets out to stop Preedy, and the matter comes to court. Not only does Syson fail, but he begins to re-examine his own faith. Like Gary himself, he does not deny God, but finds surer manifestations of him in the ordinary give and take...
Lampoon president Edward M. Tarlov '60 claimed that his organization had arranged the parody. "I've got 560 signatures affirming that the Fortnightly could not have possibly handled such an issue." A Fortnightly editor countered, "Humbug. People just don't believe aristocrats can be funny. We proved they are wrong...