Word: pun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that was in 1843. The Americans who have followed General Napier into Asia are far more apt to say peccavi without intending a pun. Vast numbers of well-meaning Americans are instantly ready to feel guilty and inadequate about their nation's role among the "underdeveloped" peoples. This book is a slashing, oversimplified, often silly and yet not-to-be-ignored attack on the men and women who have taken up the white man's burden for the U.S. in Southeast Asia...
...chasing hero. In the story, the narrator is smitten by a cute little nymphetease on the beach at Biarritz-but it is only a poignant little saga of puppy love quickly brought to an end by the boy's tutor. Nabokov's Dozen lacks Lolita's pun-prone pyrotechnics. But it shares with it Nabokov's fascinating gift for translating the machine-tooled commonplaces of U.S. life into a surreal landscape of fantasy, a kind of Poe-like, gadget-haunted region of Weir. Thus a soda-fountain stool violently revolves into a "tall mushroom," a newly...
...find such remarkable people? Wright saw the way after newspaper stories drew 80 Birmingham couples for a similar test financed by one Captain Oliver Bird, 78, of Bird's Custard. Wright sent a carefully worded ad to the London Daily Telegraph, which rejected it with a pun: "The conception is distasteful to us." With little hope, he tried the Times, which unexpectedly accepted the ad and netted 20 replies. Tabloids quickly spotted it, published stories that netted 100 more volunteer couples...
...19th century, the word Verdi was a nightmare. It haunted them from the very walls in huge letters, like the V sign of World War II. The great risorgimento that threw out the alien rulers and made the Italians a nation used Verdi as its symbolic pun-a tribute to Italy's greatest composer and a proud abbreviation for the name and title of its King, "Vittorio Emanuele, Re è d'Italia...
...Burning Desire. Kishi's enemies, making a pun on his name, call him ryō kishi-meaning, roughly, "one who tries to keep a foot on both banks of the river." During the three years he spent in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison as a "war crimes suspect"-he was General Tojo's Commerce and Industry Minister-Kishi claims to have been seized by a "burning desire" to see Japan rebuilt according to democratic principles. Yet, as Premier, he has surrounded himself with a kitchen Cabinet composed of men like bull-necked Nationalist Okinori Kaya, 69. Kaya...