Word: penchants
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Unknown (Lon Chaney). Although his penchant for weird roles has occasioned many a jest,* audiences are beginning to realize that Lon Chaney stands on a pedestal of Hollywood, the one actor dedicated to the serious grotesque. His most recent incarnation is Alonzo, armless wonder of a traveling circus. In reality a full-bodied man, Alonzo straps himself into deformity in order to conceal from a hounding police that the double-thumbed hand identified with a notorious murder is his own. So accustomed is he to eating, drinking, smoking with his toes, that even when free from the straps, his hands...
...honor to print my letter of May 23, but again you indulged in your proclivity for footnotes, and when it comes to "foot" notes you seem to have a penchant for putting your foot...
...unusual word to convey a meaning that could have been as easily and as quickly conveyed by a more common word, he is held in contempt by his associates. You seem to go to great length to make a display of your vocabulary. You have had a penchant for using unusual words since your publication started, and I had occasion to write to you in a similar vein a few years ago, but "the seed apparently has fallen on barren ground...
...Life and Times of Martha Hepplethwaite" is the pretentious title Mr. Sullivan has chosen for his volume, this being the first, and probably the best, of the thirty-odd selections that he offers. And Martha is an extraordinary girl. She is Mr. Sullivan's stenographer, with a penchant for turning somersaults and handsprings in the office, taking dictation while dangling by one leg from a chandelier, and using her employer's purple suspenders for exercisers, with inkwells tied to the ends for weighs. You can imagine what a hard time poor Mr. Sullivan has with...
Last week the U. S. Patent Office, making its annual report, signaled distress. It would have to have more employes, larger quarters, greater appropriations. The nation's inventive genius, or more accurately the national penchant for protecting inventive genius, had increased until there was a patent application filed for every thousandth inhabitant-110,000 in a year. The Office found itself with 58,000 applications still on the docket, despite its having cleared up 35,000 hangovers from the last three years. For the first time in history, the Office had felt obliged to rid itself of its vast...