Word: plebeians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stout plebeian figure, Louis liked chopping wood and making locks. He had almost no style at all. He did not even take a mistress. The only thing he shared with other French kings was a passion for hunting. Between 1775 and 1789, he ran down 1,274 stags. Apart from recording that, his journal struck a low for an age of compulsive memoir writing. Its most common jotting was "Nothing." That, in fact, was the sole entry in his diary on the day the Bastille was stormed...
Like Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny in Italy a week earlier, Kosygin got a friendly welcome in Britain-though anti-Communist demonstrators dogged his path. When he could get away from the high and mighty, Kosygin got to shake a few plebeian hands, sometimes in response to cries of: "Give us a shake, mate." At one point a pretty 18-year-old girl popped past police escorts, greeted him with: "Hello, my old fruit."* Replied Kosygin gravely: "You are the young Britain I want to meet. I wish you peace and prosperity...
...infuriating than to see another passenger get treatment that includes special decorative tags for his luggage and the right to while away his waiting time in one of the luxurious private lounges that many airlines maintain as part of their VIP "clubs." This becomes even more annoying as the plebeian passenger thinks it all over and realizes that he has paid every penny as much for the flight as the type who is getting VIP favors...
...radical critique of the Establishment seems to me basically a conservative appeal against the insensitivity of a professedly liberal bureaucracy. The conservative tradition of course has no monopoly on dignity and freedom, but that tradition does enjoy a virtual monopoly in intellectually defending those values against secular, plebeian governments. Proudhon and Sorel, French theorists of an older New Left, looked to the great pessimistic conservatives, Pascal and Tocqueville, for inspiration. The American New Left might profit by doing the same...
Tammy Grimes's Cyrenne is a perkily perfect farceuse, a bedroom imp continually assuming antic positions with dry-witted composure. Edward Woodward's Percy is a plebeian prince of pathos. Under his toothbrush mustache lurks a toothy nervous tic of a grin with which he commits endless facial suicides of self-doubt. He is as simple as the wooden rattle (a soccer-game noisemaker) that he carries in his hand. A mere kiss from Cyrenne makes him act like a porpoise with convulsions...