Word: personation
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...found the gold plates upon which the Book of Mormon was inscribed. . . . The symbols found on them were no more mystic than written French to a fourth-grade American schoolboy. Magic Spectacles which you mention [are] undoubtedly the Urim and Thummim, an affair which was worn on the person, much as a telephone operator's mouthpiece, and which is not to be confused with the seer-stone...
Another Telegraph correspondent suggested that it was merely VIPS (the wartime phrase for Very Important Persons) spelled backwards. "With demobilization, the term came into civvy street [and] received its demob suit with all its original connotation-that of a person having a good time at the expense of others." Gossip Writer Charles Graves claimed: "My deep research into the source of the word shows that it was originally used colloquially by race-gangs [for] a shady character who lives by his wits, but without the physical or mental courage to show violence or turn burglar." A bookish reporter...
Sole Exception. Until last fall, the canon (law) of the Episcopal Church had been clear, strict and uncompromising-stricter and less compromising in application than the Roman Catholic canon. No divorced person-with the sole exception of the innocent party in a divorce for adultery-could ever again be married in the Episcopal Church. If he or she chose to go through a form of marriage in some other church, that was a matter for his own conscience; the church would never recognize it as a true marriage...
...papers hidden. Eventually the papers moved, with Boswell's great-great-grandson and heir, Lord Talbot de Malahide, to Malahide Castle in Ireland. Famed U.S. collector Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach cabled Lord Talbot an offer of $250,000 for the Malahide Papers. Said Lord Talbot: "Who is this person? Please ask him not to correspond with me. We have not been introduced...
Wealthy U.S. Bibliophile Ralph Heyward Isham made out better. He showed up at Malahide Castle in person, got on well with the family, in 1927 came away with the Malahide Papers for a rumored $300,000 to $500,000 (TIME, March 9, 1936). Three years later he got another batch that Lady Talbot discovered in an old croquet box. She had carefully inked out all of Boswell's uninhibited indiscretions, gave experts the 18-month job of restoring the deletions. Not until the mid-'30s were the Malahide Papers issued, in a $900 limited edition...