Word: pickwickian
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...those who know him best Sam Morison's bark is worse than his bite. At the age of fifty-four, the scholar with an almost forbidding air of formality has mellowed into an affable squire with a Pickwickian sense of humor. Though his main interests are still U. S. History before 1860 and Christopher Columbus, to hear him talk one would think that life consisted solely of sailing, horseback riding, and the tinkle of slender glasses filled with wine. Back in 1917 Professor Morison talked differently. The call to arms saw him enlist as a private, and though he never...
When will Harvard exchange its haughty pretense and Pickwickian elitism for a genuine concern for the student community it represents? I am happy at Middlebury, an institution that treats me with respect. Harvard should get a clue. --Charles Snow
...from present to past, subject to self, city to countryside. As Hoagland charges about from topic to reflection to stylistic glissando, we find, as observed critic Geoffrey Wolff, that "it is impossible to know (but easy to feel) what the essay is 'about.'" Hoagland, ablaze in a trail of Pickwickian serendipity, is the sympathetic purveyor of black bears, red wolves, and city rats; he records the folk lore of early settlers in British Columbia and Vermont and the survivalist point of view from New York City; he journeys to the Sudan, collecting all manner of stories and "hemorrhaging with loneliness...
...happened before. There were Pickwick chintzes, Pickwick cigars, Pickwick hats, Pickwick canes with tassels, Pickwick coats; and there were Weller corduroys and Boz cabs. There were innumerable plagiarisms, parodies, and sequels-a Pickwick Abroad, by G.W.M. Reynolds; a Posthumous Papers of the Cadger Club; a Posthumous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, by a hack who impudently called himself Bos; and a Penny Pickwick, not to mention all the stage piracies and adaptations. People named their cats and dogs "Sam," "Jingle," "Mrs. Bardell," and "Job Trotter." It is doubtful if any other single work of letters before or since has ever...
Darwin truly was a devotee of the old school and although the selections in every way retain their infectious appeal, it is best to relish Mostly Golf in the Pickwickian sense. One is transported into a long forgotten and a more idyllic world that belies reality. Mostly Golf conveys the indian summer tranquillity of Victorian England before the First otherwise sleepy hamlets turned out for cricket matches and the landed aristocracy played over the heath and whins of sedate seaside links...