Word: midwesternisms
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Long before his low-pitched, easy, flat Midwestern voice became known to the U.S. over CBS, Indiana-born Elmer Davis had earned a reputation as one of the best newsmen in the business. A graduate of Franklin College (1910), he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then he worked ten years on the New York Times as reporter and editorial writer. He quit to freelance, wrote popular fiction. Scholarly in tone and appearance, he is no pedant. When the Saturday Review of Literature carried a weighty article on Indiana authors some years ago, he wrote a dour reply: Indiana...
...belated credit to the women who never get it: those who helped make their men great. Unfortunately, the great man (Joel McCrea) chosen for this bow to womankind wasn't worth the effort. His name is Hoyt, a romantic frontiersman of 1848 who dreams of building a great Midwestern city. His idealism persuades a Philadelphia Main Line girl (Barbara Stanwyck) to go West with him. Some 60 years later he is a dying U.S. Senator, silver rich. He had apparently got his city built (on land he owned). She is the wife he abandoned after she nursed...
...stage of summer stock, does it well. Carrying as props a raft of gorgeous co-eds and not-so-good-looking All Americans, the picture ranges from the last minute football thrills of a Frank Merriwell to the questionable propriety of Hot Garters, the other woman. Henry Fonda, the midwestern professor with a home life, ranks as a growing threat to Jimmy Stewart's laurels as the homespun American who rings true in the pinches...
Biggest men in the Army are Midwestern offspring of Scandinavians. Average height, which rises from East to West, slumps again in the Southwest, where Mexican forbears have left their stamp...
North of the border, relations between the Irish and the predominantly Midwestern U.S. troops were somewhat strained. Illogical to the Irish mind was the troops' complaining of the lack of supplies while they absorb all the surpluses in sight, especially beer. Stopped by a small-town constable for passing a red light, a U.S. trooper rudely exclaimed: "I've never seen traffic lights in a cemetery before." Another, asked his opinion of Irish girls, glumly replied: "At home, we bury our dead." The Irish have a tendency to resent such-remarks. When a U.S. technician...