Word: kerflop
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...living with Edward Albee, who reputedly based the description of the imaginary son in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on him. In 1965, two years after the couple had broken up, McNally saw his own first full-length play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, go kerflop on Broadway. He still smarts from the experience. On opening night, just before curtain time, he spotted playwright Jean Kerr and her critic husband Walter. "She said, 'Well, let's go see what his boyfriend has written.' The critics weren't reviewing a play by a new American playwright; they...
...uncertain as the American frontier. Boorstin explores them in an erudite and eloquent essay on the American gift of gab. With verbacious vitality, the growing American language devoured Indian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Negro words. Others were invented (caucus, lynch-law, squatter), improvised (sockdolager, spondulix, absquatulate), and embellished (kerflop, kerthump, kersouse). The general exuberance also burst out in political oratory and tall talk ("Bust me wide open if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savagerous"). It spilled over in the invincible optimism with which new towns...
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