Word: prim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dozen "witches in modern dress" were all youthfully slender, lively of expression, some of them bucktoothed and "prancing" of gait. Although they were married and active sexually, they secretly dreaded the sex act and remained "psychically virgins." They had a "miniminy mouth"; that is, they were " 'mim,' prim, reticent, shy, affected." They tended to be frigid, attract weak, boyish men, hated kissing on the mouth (a witch's kiss was believed to draw out the soul). Often they had affairs, mainly with married men. They hated and hurt men, yet believed they were of loving disposition; they...
Prima Donna: The word has, in the mouths of the more thinking members of the musical public, taken on a half-humorous, half-caustic meaning . . . (The child who in an examination paper misspelt the term Prim Madonna was very young...
...week's end Venice's biennial roundup of contemporary painting and sculpture, due to open this week, had installed only a quarter of the nearly 6,000 paintings and sculptures sent in from 34 countries (including Russia for the first time since 1934). Only at the prim brick American Pavilion did contentment reign. Brisk, brusque Katharine Kuh, curator of modern painting at Chicago's Art Institute, had the U.S. contribution all up and dusted. It made a striking show...
Died. Marie Laurencin, 72, topflight French modernist painter, famed for her wispy, pastel-toned portraits of doe-eyed young girls in diaphanous gowns; of a heart attack; in Paris. Prim, red-haired Painter Laurencin tried three times to enter Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux Arts, was coldly blocked. Critics labeled her early work "decadent" and "ugly." After World War I, she changed her style, was later described as the only considerable figure who painted like a woman. ("Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier...
...impressed a Police Athletic League supervisor that he bought her a full-size racket. Later the pro at Harlem's Cosmopolitan Tennis Club taught her court tactics and coaxed her into daily practice. By 1948, at the age of 20, she was Negro women's champion. The prim and proper U.S.L.T.A. could not long evade inviting her to Forest Hills, and there, in 1950, she gave former National Champion Louise Brough the scare of her life before Louise's experience and talent finally pulled her out of the match. Ranked seventh in the U.S. in 1953, Althea...