Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cold Outside. It was all about a girl who kept protesting that she had to go home and a boy who kept insisting that she stay. Outside, he warned, the snow was knee-deep. Queasy NBC first banned the lyrics as too racy, then decided they contained nothing provably prurient, and put the tune on the air. Baby hit the hit parade and began climbing...
...South, says Niebuhr, the evangelical churches could not cope with the moral issue of slavery and therefore channeled their energies into "a scrupulous legalism, expressed in extravagant rules of Sabbath observance and a prurient attitude toward sex problems." In the North, evangelicalism "degenerated into that mixture of religious sentiment and the worship of prosperity, success and comfort which inevitably . . . obscures, rather than clarifies, the real issues of life...
...success to its graceful, believable illustration of how a lonely sergeant and a lonely nice-girl go to bed together. On the screen the young people spend most of their time gracelessly, unbelievably showing how careful they are to avoid just that. The movie is most coyly prurient where the play was most pleasantly candid...
Pritchett is most at home writing about the English tradition of picaresque heroes and prurient heroines. The 17th and 18th Centuries, he believes, produced literary techniques which later novelists have been wise to adopt. Smollett developed the physical realism and "chamberpot humor" which characterizes much of Joyce. Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many...
Against the windows of Manhattan's Criminal Courts Building the bulletlike drops of the first spring rains beat and splashed with homicidal violence. The crowd of cops, dicks, court attendants, learned counsel, plain loafers and plain prurient goons who infest such scenes beat against the court's doors. Behind the doors was beginning one of the most sensational murder trials in Manhattan's legal history. Justice, as men understand it, was being meted out to Wayne Lonergan, handsome, six-foot, crop-headed Royal Canadian Air Force aircraftman charged with murdering his socialite wife last October...