Word: oughtn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...instance?" a candidate asked. Another young man, apparently an officer, impeccably dressed, who had been standing in the background pulling his lip, answered. "Well, we don't like to have you write about hackneyed subjects like the central kitchen. As for sex, sex can be hilarious, but it oughtn't to be obscene. Use taste." (The business-like lecturer in front nodded in agreement and shuffled his notes.) "Yes, use your taste. Otherwise, though, in humor nothing is sacred...
...Bessemer, the lean, sixtyish granddaughter of famed Steelman-Inventor Sir Henry Bessemer, whose family home is within a stone's throw of the Bluebell and Primrose. Though she usually rode about in her own motorcar, wealthy Miss Bessemer had an odd affection for the Bluebell and Primrose. "We oughtn't," she told her neighbors, "to look at it as a wee strip of line, but as part of a whole principle." In England there is always an appropriate society for such invokers of principle. She sought the aid of the Society for the Reinvigoration of Unremunerative Branch Lines...
...James and George Bernard Shaw (whom she succeeded as drama critic of the Saturday Review). Venomous with bores, she flattened them joyfully. When a vacation acquaintance buttonholed her with "I don't know whether you realize it ... but my aunt was a Thunderby," Ada cried, "Oh, how terrible! Oughtn't we to inform the management?" Accused of using peroxide on her hair, she flashed that she "only darkened it a little at the roots...