Word: prurient
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...Among startling unlocked for discoveries were X-rays, natural radioactivity, artificial radioactivity. X-rays caused such a furor among laymen after their discovery by Roentgen that the New Jersey Legislature introduced a law forbidding their use in opera glasses, for fear that prurient individuals would be able to see through the garments of ladies...
...Gentleman Jockey Crawford Burton, twice winner of the dangerous Maryland Hunt Cup, posing in his racing silks as an endorser of Camel cigarets' recuperative powers. By a horrible mischance, the photograph of Mr. Burton, holding his saddle and girth, reproduced in such a manner that to a prurient or imaginative eye it appeared to show Mr. Burton indecently exposed as only a man could be exposed...
When Crawford Burton, who is a stockbroker when not riding, showed up next day at the New York Stock Exchange, he found that its notoriously prurient members had so chosen to interpret his picture. When Mr. Burton entered the Exchange smoking room, he said that scores of brokers began to brandish copies of Collier's (one of the first publications to receive and print the advertisement) and set up such a gibbering that he could execute no orders, went home to seclude himself for days...
...Road, assailing it on grounds of rank indecency, and the very fact that it had been adjusted for the adolescent minds of the Hub city, the play which ran so long in New York will probably soon fade here. Crowded to the rafters on the first two nights by prurient sensation hunters, the theatre was only half filled on Friday, and unless a sudden renaissance is experienced, Henry Hull and Company had better make tracks elsewhere...
...have got to decide . . . whether the report each [newspaper] published is fair and accurate. . . . These are all of them great newspapers. . . . The fact that they deal with subjects which are unpleasant in their nature is no ground for saying that they are pandering to the tastes of the more prurient-minded. After all, these newspapers are not written only for the edification of high-minded, refined, and delicately moral people like members of the legal profession. [Laughter...