Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER of Newburyport, Mass. Realizing, as no stuffy conformist would, that the quickest way to become a U.S. peer is to confer the title on oneself, Dexter sensibly did just that. "It is the voise of the peopel," he explained in his firm, aristocratic prose, "and I cant Help it and ... it dont hurt A Cat ..." Born in 1747, America's first peer started life "Dressin of skins for briches & glovs," would probably never have grown too big for his briches had he not spent every penny of his savings buying up U.S. "Continentals" and state securities...
...wife, never disemboweled eclairs, covered his nose with pollen or caressed bees and wasps. "A man does not love a woman for her genius: he loves her in spite of her genius"-and Goudeket's love was as balanced and precise as a line of Colette's prose. For when his tempestuous wife sat down to write (for three hours every afternoon), it was as if some supernatural policeman appeared and took her wildness under complete control. Colette, at work, was humble, painstaking, indefatigably exact. The marvel of her work lies in the discipline with which she marshaled...
...communiqué was more softly worded than the one that had ousted Security Boss Lavrenty Beria exactly four years earlier (only to be shot in six months), but beneath its repetitious, doctrinaire prose, the voice of Nikita Khrushchev was clearly heard. The three party bigwigs had long opposed Khrushchev on six specific counts: They had 1) "sought to frustrate so vastly important a measure as the reorganization of industrial management"; 2) "failed to recognize the necessity for increased material incentives for the collective-farm peasantry"; 3) stubbornly resisted "the measures which the . . . party was carrying out to do away with...
...middle class tradesman who will nevertheless squander any amount of money to acquire the social graces and intellectual refinement that characterize people of "quality." Jourdain will live forever as the man who was overcome with astonished glee upon learning that what he had been speaking for forty years was prose. But he is also the man who puts on his gown in order to hear music better; and who, on being asked whether he understands the Latin that has just been spoken, unhesitatingly replies, "Of course. But act as though I weren't acquainted with it and explain...
...manages to extol such dubious assets as the city's sky-high alcoholism rate and the fleas, which, according to Caen, "bite only tourists and newcomers" because the natives are "so full of garlic." At times, Garlic Lover Caen sounds as if he had distilled his high-calorie prose from the Reader's Digest's Picturesque Speech Department. Sample: "The sidewalk flower stands exuding such clouds of heavy perfume that their owners should be arrested for fragrancy...