Word: laddered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Viconian Thunderclap. Finnegans Wake, say Campbell and Robinson, "is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind." (Tim Finnegan was originally the hero of an Irish vaudeville song who falls off a ladder and is thought to be dead until a friend splashes whiskey over him at the funeral wake.) The four parts of Joyce's novel reflect Italian Philosopher Giovanni Battista Vice's theory that history eternally passes and repasses through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, chaotic. Finnegans Wake suggests that life has again reached the stage of chaos and is awaiting a divine thunderclap...
...Parr and wallstrait are puns ("par" and "Wall Street") on the rise & fall of stockmarket values. The immense polysyllable that fol lows the word "fall" is the voice of God's wrath over the fall of man, the crash of Finnegan from the ladder, and the thunder clap that inaugurates a new period of history...
...county road overseer. By 1934 Harry Truman had become presiding judge of Jackson County, Mo. (which in Missouri is actually the county's administrative officer; as such he spent $25,000,000 on roads and buildings). He was ripe for another step up the ladder, and asked Pendergast for the county collectorship. Big Tom replied: "The best I can do now, Harry, is a United States Senatorship; how's that...
...headlines on spectacular safaris; he shot tapirs and jaguars in Brazil's Matto Grosso, became the first American to bag a panda, hunted timarau in the Philippines, spotted blue sheep and golden monkeys in Asia. Like his father and Cousin Franklin, he had started up the Roosevelt golden ladder: Harvard, the New York State Legislature, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. But unlike his father or his Cousin Franklin, he never became Governor...
...time Numan entered the Foreign Office at Ankara in 1929 as a departmental head, foreign attaches already knew this sick young man with an abscessed lung and deficient hearing as a cold, hard, calculating bargainer. When, 22 months ago, Numan's gradual ascent up the Foreign Office ladder brought him to the top rung as Minister, no one was surprised...