Word: minuets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...practiced eye saw it, was "taking the affectations of our ancestors and making them endearing." He laid out his action first with the help of some young Broadway actors. When he finally got a chance to drill the singers, he had most of their movements plotted like a minuet ("If you beat your breast, I'll kill you!"). All told, he had the cast onstage for 17 hours of instructions, cajolings and threats...
...Chesterfield's emotional budget, sentiment was a luxury, style a necessity. "Do everything," the earl instructed a godson, "in minuet-time; speak, think, and move always in that measure." The irony of Chesterfield's own life was that he gracefully missed every other beat. He served George II ably as ambassador to The Hague, and was probably one of the few lord-lieutenants of Ireland whose blarney charmed the Irish. But solid triumphs abroad never netted him more than slim cabinet posts at home, and George II scornfully dubbed the diminutive earl a "dwarf-baboon...
...seduced a plump little French governess, discarded her after a year or so, left her in his will "five hundred pounds as some compensation of the injury." The illegitimate son she bore him turned out to be the sad apple of his eye. The sage of the minuet had sired a clodhopper. But Chesterfield was the last to admit...
...well as the ear. Arranged in exact syllabic patterns, and sprinkled with subtle internal rhymes, they are difficult to read aloud, and often sound a bit prosy. But on the page, as in The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing, her style is as elegant as a minuet. The mind, she writes...
Only a practiced and attentive follower of the diplomatic minuet could make out all that was going on in Europe last week. From Paris to Rome a bewildering assortment of alphabetical outfits solemnly assembled; the air was murmurous with a busy shuffling of diplomatic papers, the inquiries of Wise Men, the reports of soldiers, the undertone of simultaneous translations. Among them...