Word: prurient
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...Prurient Hindquarters. At least three-fourths of all actors started as the rear half of a stage cow, but Griffith is the only one who still complains that the front half "stank to high heaven." Also, he brought new dimensions to the role by continually rubbing the cow's hindquarters pruriently against the scenery. He was ultimately trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and he has been in demand ever since, interrupted only by World War II, when he was stationed in Swansea town and became a close drinking friend of Dylan Thomas...
Gover, of course, is far from being the first writer to lament the prurient curiosity that sex crimes stir in the anonymous public. If his shocking book contained only this one macabre dimension, he might be dismissed as another literary sensationalist trying to deplore his cheesecake and have...
Like many another European writer who grew up under Adolf Hitler, German Novelist Gunter Grass, 36, is a man shadowed by the cruelty and grotesquerie of life. The groans and squeaks, the howls and primitive chuckles of his first hero, a prurient dwarf named Oskar Mazerath, made Grass's The Tin Drum the most powerful first novel to come out of Germany in a generation...
Some dyspeptic Iroquois brave named it "Se-rach-to-que," which has been translated as "Floating Scum upon the Water." Among dip-minded suburban housewives it enjoys minor fame as the birthplace of the potato chip. James Gordon Bennett was moved to entitle it "the seraglio of the prurient aristocracy." To the rheumy rich of the '90s it was "The Spa," and its eggy sulphur waters were just the ticket for constipation and gout. But now the seltzer baths belong to the state, and for eleven months out of the year Saratoga Springs (pop. 16,000) is a quiet...
...United States Supreme Court has held that the test for obscenity is "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." Said Justice Marks: "The opinions of authors and critics cannot be substituted for those of the average person in the contemporary community. Neither the quality of the writing nor the so-called literary worth of the book prevents the book from being adjudged obscene...