Word: plum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Forbidden Fruit. Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey dismissed Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) as English literature's "performing flea," an acidulous comment that P.G. himself ("Plum" to friends) loved to repeat. But other writers, ranging from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell to Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, recognized that Wodehouse was a good bit more. Waugh, an indisputable master of the comic novel, would reread his favorites from the Wodehouse canon every year, as some people go back for spiritual sustenance to Shakespeare or the Bible. "For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no 'aboriginal calamity...
...smooth but hard-nosed millionaire special assistant had been job hunting since he resigned last June. For a time it seemed that Flanigan might be U.S. ambassador to Spain, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee let his nomination die. The Senators were reluctant to hand a diplomatic plum to a Nixon aide who had had at least a passing involvement in the Administration's marketing of ambassadorships. During a House hearing in July, Nixon's lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, recalled being told by Flanigan to get in touch with a department-store millionairess, Ruth Farkas, because "she is interested...
...service." They were sick of seeing servants portrayed as scene transitions: "You know, 'here's your hat, sir,' or having their bottoms pinched." Neither woman did anything to rectify the situation until a year later, when an actress boasted to Jean that she had landed a plum part. "I was furiously jealous," says Jean, who immediately called a producer friend. "What do I do with an idea for a TV series?" she asked. "You bring it to me," was his reply...
...something very close to style. An image drawn from these times captures a rural American dream: "O, it was a beautiful tree, right to the northwest side of my car shed, two-car shed; had that '26 Ford and that '28 Chevrolet stationed close to that plum tree." Such prosperity was Shaw's undoing. Local whites "didn't like to see a nigger with too much." The sharecroppers' union told blacks that they could some day run their own affairs, and Shaw joined. But a white landowner coveted what Shaw had, and the future...
...press. Now, are they dumb? Are they stupid? It's an Ellsberg rule--Ellsberg's Law of Bureaucracy, I'm not a bureaucratic theorist but what I learned in the Pentagon was: Anyone can be as dumb as he has to be to keep his job. The highest plum that any reporter can offer his boss is access to Henry Kissinger, the ability to have a private conversation with Henry Kissinger. You don't get that ability twice if you use it the first time to talk about what a conniver, fool, murderer, war criminal Henry Kissinger...