Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...idiot husband...
...when he named his book. The producers forgot it when they cast sleek John Gilbert for exuberant Jeffrey Dwyer, taut poet, who loved one girl (Aileen Pringle) and married another (Eleanor Boardman). The producers also overlooked the fact that the one girl, who had later to cope with an idiot husband, furnished well over a third of the tale's power. Cheers for this film, if any, should be dedicated to Miss Boardman, the one able performer...
...within the power of the state. They pointed out that, according to the ancient law, if there is the least nick in the long smooth blade with which the beast is killed, the meat is not strictly kosher, nor is it if the slaughterer be a deaf mute, an idiot, a minor, or a non-Jew. How can all these things be surely ascertained in regard, say, to a lamb chop? Is unknowing transgression a sin? That was what the packers wanted to know...
...From the noun cretin, meaning idiot or village fool. A cretin is a creature of nightmare, humanity's most loathsome being. The word, even in adjectival form, is seldom used jocularly by people of discrimination, since one is seldom called upon to refer with jocularity to the most abject embodiment of mankind on earth...
Such are the cretins. But how few, suggests Dr. Berman, are aware of the transformation that has been wrought upon these wretches by modern Science. By furnishing the hormones, or vital gland secretion, in pill form, manufactured from the thyroid extract of animals, the village idiot has been reclaimed in thousands of cases. He (or she) rides on the trolley and subway beside you. He works at the next desk, exercises at the next machine, pours tea at any table, walks, talks, transacts, marries, yet is never detected unless somehow cut off, Antaeus-like, from the source of vitality. Cretins...