Word: lings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...mayor, Ezekiel Cobb comports himself like a combination of Fiorello La Guardia and Charlie Chan. He says: "Honesty without experience is as water with no bucket to carry it in-Ling Po." He sets out to gain experience by discharging every dishonest employe in the city government, awarding a garbage disposal contract to the lowest bidder instead of to the grafter who expects it. When outraged politicians slip a package of incriminating bonds into his safe deposit vaults, Ezekiel Cobb decides to use brusque methods. He rounds up every malefactor in Stockport, locks them in a cellar, threatens to have...
...theatrical. He postures, tears his hair, wriggles, shouts, jumps, and with a gesture or a lift of the voice delineates such spectacles as a herd of camels, Rev. Mr. Davidson in Rain, Judas strangling himself (with a strand of Magdalen's hair), a door bell going Ting-a-ling-a-ling, an old family servitor, a Southern belle you-alling in crinolines...
...consider the Princess Der Ling a much...
Eldest Daughter Ailing ("Pleasant") Soong is the Sibyl of the clan. She approved the hot haste in which Old Charlie married off Second Sister Ching-ling ("Happy") to First President Sun. Years later when Dr. Sun was dead and when Generalissimo Chiang, once a secretary of Dr. Sun, had conquered all China, "Pleasant" said: "We Soongs can make much of this man." Though he was a Buddhist with concubines and the Soongs are Christians, she approved when Chiang put aside his concubines and married Youngest Sister Mei-ling ("Beautiful"). Meanwhile "Pleasant" herself had married the 75th lineal descendant of Confucius...
Some of the tales that will strike a Western eye: the Bunyanesque vicissitudes of the stout-hearted Ling Ch'ung; the Decameronish deception of Wu the Elder by his wicked wife and the bawdy old woman; the Tattooed Priest, a kind of Friar Tuck of the outlaws; the robbers' rescue of the youth about to be executed. Though some of the incidents would never have passed Queen Victoria (in the 18th Century Shui Hu Chuan was banned in China as "licentious") they are narrated always with polite decency...