Word: poorly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...State farm at Eagle Bridge (there were 500 of them last summer) might seem a chore to someone else, but Grandma loves having them. She also enjoys showing off the snapshots they sometimes leave with her. "Now this," she will remark, "was a very nice family from Ohio . . . This poor girl lost her kitty just before she came .. . This was a woman all the way from Australia. She brought me a kangaroo skin and a hula skirt...
During the wartime food shortage, researchers noticed a curious thing about the health of chickens. Well-housed chickens, deprived of animal-protein foods, began to droop and look sickly. Chickens living in dirty, littered henhouses did all right, even on a poor diet; but when the henhouse litter was cleaned up, they began to droop too. This was especially interesting to six Lederle Laboratories researchers who guessed that something in the chicken litter was supplying some mysterious factor the chickens needed...
...what must have been the simplest form of courtship and marriage short of caveman seizure. The boy picked his girl, left a goat in front of her father's hut and got his wife. No words spoken, no fuss, no marriage ceremony. And if the bridegroom was too poor to own a goat, a bundle of firewood did the trick...
...abide Rome. When a cousin asked Bridie to marry him, she agreed to "turn" Protestant, and Aunt Lisha, delighted, left her everything when she died. But then came Catholic Aunt Rose Anne to invoke the wrath of the church, curse her roundly and give her a clout besides. Poor, sweet, ignorant Bridie, half demented by repeated bouts of intolerance, rushed wildly out of the house, was found dead in a boghole next...
Caldwell was especially good at mimicking Southern folk rhetoric, its mixture of lecherous filth and vivid images drawn from rural life, its passages of whining literalness relieved by sudden bright patches of corrupt folk poetry. His ability at recording poor white and Negro speech was, in fact, greater than his ability to make creative use of it in the framework of a novel, which is why his best pieces read more advantageously as off-center anecdotes than as realistic narratives...