Word: larking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Berging or, just possibly, Bunburying. It is 70 years since John Worthing went Bunburying in Wilde's comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. Onstage, Bunburying is such a mischievous male lark that, as Auden puts it, "Whenever I see or read the play, I always wish I did not know what I do about Wilde's life at the time he was writing it." Bunburying was shorthand for a visit to a fashionable London male whorehouse, and Bunburying, or berging-the disguise of homosexual material in literature-is still a common phenomenon in this outspoken...
...English humor and sometimes doubted its existence. The professor illustrated his view: He had heard someone telling the old joke about the male robin who, upon finding a brown egg in his nest, inquired of his wife regarding this phenomenon. She replied that she had done it for a lark. The professor remembered having heard the joke retold later by a Briton who told it intact, except for the tag line, which became: "I did it for a sparrow." This, the professor insisted, made it difficult to believe in English humor...
...railroads practice all sorts of tricks with timetables to discourage traffic. The Chesapeake and Ohio schedules its trains between Detroit and Grand Rapids to arrive after 2 a.m. The Southern Pacific's Lark reaches Los Angeles from San Francisco 35 minutes too late to connect with the eastbound Super Chief and 20 minutes after the last train to San Diego. Passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio's night train from Washington to Detroit are put off at Fostoria, Ohio at 5:30 a.m. and loaded aboard busses for the last leg of the trip. Then there is the nostalgia...