Word: mugging
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Over the centuries, students have always regarded earnest study with deep displeasure. The deskbound undergraduate has been variously damned as a swot, a brown-bagger or a mug. Chemistry is still stinks, Thucydides is Thicksides, and studying education is doing Eddyoo. To be failed in an examination has traveled from being gravelled (after Marlowe's Faustus, who "gravelled the pastors of the German church") to being gulphed, ftoor&d, knocked out, pilled, pipped, ploughed or plucked...
Love & Hate. Close associates say that Godfrey's contrariness is his outstanding characteristic. His Girl Friday, Margaret ("Mug") Richardson, says: "Arthur's contradictions are the only thing close to talent he's got." He is confusingly shy one minute and brash the next, sentimental and savage, generous and stingy, as quick to unreasoning affection as unreasoning dislike. Said one bruised ex-friend: "Arthur either starts off with great loves and then hates people, or with great hates and then loves them." He also has a sense of proportion that is all his own. The man who wept...
...Mug Says No. His ascent to stardom has not been entirely a one-man show. Considerable credit goes to hardworking, 35-year-old Mug Richardson, who has been with him for 16 years, ever since -as "Miss North Carolina of 1934"-she stopped off in Washington on her way to New York. Arthur, visibly impressed, pays her the highest tribute he can make to womanhood: "She's wholesome." And he adds: "I knew she wouldn't fit into the kind of razzmatazz she was headed...
Beginning as his secretary, Mug moved up to a quasi-partnership in Arthur Godfrey Productions, Inc., and has frequently been subject to fitful bursts of Godfrey generosity. At one time or another he has given her a secretarial education, a sloop, a farm in North Carolina, a Pontiac, a mink coat. Godfrey, referring both to her efficiency and her stubbornness, describes Mug as "my left arm-with my right hand on it." He superstitiously credits her with being a good-luck piece, and is apt to blame failures, like his dismal showing in the 1946 Broadway musical Three to Make...
...material turned out by Godfrey's five writers is channeled through Mug, who sits beside Arthur on most of his shows. Items that she finds amusing are passed on. He has great faith that her judgment is in tune with that of "the people." She also acts as a buffer between Godfrey and the advertising men. "Whenever anything's suggested to Arthur, Mug always says no," observes CBS President Frank Stanton. "That gives him time to think. If he decides to do it, he can say he finally talked Mug around. If he decides...