Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Everything Hums. The word "solunar" was coined by Knight from the Latin names for sun and moon. Scientists can scoff, but he believes-and several thousand sportsmen who follow his tables will swear-that at certain times of day all nature seems to wake up. Fish bite, ducks and pheasants abound, field dogs are alert and easy to train, and even human beings suddenly feel good for no apparent reason. The solunar tables chart the times of day when everything starts to hum. Says Knight: "We don't know what causes that activity, but it applies to all life...
Knight's solunar theory is a "scientific adaptation" of an old fisherman's rule-of-thumb known as "moon up, moon down." It is also an application to inland waters of the saltwater theory that the feeding habits of fish are affected by the tides. (Fish, says Knight, like two square meals and two snacks a day.) The best solunar times vary with the longitude as well as the day, so Knight compiles different weekly tables for each of the newspapers. Each calculation involves the interplay of two forces-the sun's and the moon...
...Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, James T. Farrell beat his readers over the head with a poleax to make much the same point. Novelist Harry Sylvester, born in Brooklyn and schooled at Notre Dame, is considerably subtler as a storyteller, though hardly more graceful as a writer. Aloysius ("Moon") Gaffney is no anti-Semitic bullyboy like Tommy Gallagher, but a young Manhattan Irishman with a Fordham law degree and large horizons. With luck he will soon become an Assemblyman in Albany, and perhaps in time even sit in the big chair in New York's City Hall...
...also happens to have a few "Catholic radical" acquaintances, and though far from a radical himself, he objects when a pugnacious Brooklynite damns Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "filthy Jew advisers." One day Billy Ryan, the neighborhood Tammany boss, looks Moon straight in the eye and thunders, "You and your goddam Communist friends." A few hours later Father Malone angrily orders Moon out of the neighborhood rectory. Moon, who has never knowingly talked to a Communist in his life, recalls that a priest had once warned him that there were elements in the Church guilty of ignorant hate...
...terrible obscurantism" is what made some conservative U.S. Catholics pro-Fascist before the war, because they were ready to believe that Mussolini et al. would stamp out Communism. They were also antiliberal, anti-Negro, and anti-Semitic for a number of reasons, including Irish racial snobbism. As fiction, Moon Gaffney is hardly rnore than earnest and competent, but it is most impressive as a blast against bias, false Irish pride and the local little Father Coughlins...