Word: pukka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...personal conseil and assume that you possess all the sports cars, villas and yachts that are referred to. As a result, you and your mythical antagonist--i.e., the ever-present social enemy--become the protagonists. The verbal bouts in which you both engage are conducted in two dialects: "pukka", to which you, the sporting aristocrat, are sometimes entitled; and "non-pukka", or common vernacular, to which your "bootless and unhorsed" social opponent is restricted. Fake, for example, an extract from "At the Massage Parlor...
...pukka...
...between the lines, Donleavy's diatribes manage to say more. In passing fancies he sees visions of grace, chivalry and order. Lords sit in their castles while peasants roam the meadow (with a moat between them). Butlers who know their place well serve perfectly prepared drinks to deserving pukka-sahib colonels. At such tenderly sardonic moments, Donleavy seems to reveal himself as an inverted romantic, profoundly sad beneath his disguise because he and the world are no better than they happen...
What I like best are the book's biographies. Gems, every jack of them. Zircons, actually. George Washington in four pages. Lincoln in three. Even in the U.S., Burke 's retains its pukka airs. Calls Nixon "controversial." L.B.J.'s the chap who had "a large stock of folk tales - not all of them appropriate for a polite audience." Gerald Ford is the one who was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. Only King in the book. Pity...
Considering the thudding banalities they are forced to utter, the actors man age a lively display of cocktail-party intelligence. Deborah Kerr is very pukka memsahib, and Barry Nelson displays his boyish charm, though the patina of age has begun to dull it. Frank Langella turns out to be the drollest character onstage with his stubborn macho pride in the size of his tail...