Word: putdown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Frank O'Hara was the funniest man in the universe. Never ever met anybody so funny, with his putdown epigrams. I knew Frank very well. We were in Eliot together, and he gave the best parties in Eliot. Big cocktail parties. Everybody drank all the time back then. We used to have these teas inviting people and it was just pitchers of martinis. We didn't have any beer; it was just martinis. When Dylan Thomas came, he didn't like martinis, he didn't like gin. He said it was the sort of thing made in a chemistry...
...term Big Bang has become part of the standard scientific vocabulary, but it was first coined in the 1940s as a putdown. The idea that the universe actually had a beginning seemed just plain wacky -- especially since there was almost no evidence at the time to support it. Yet by the end of the 1960s, virtually all astrophysicists were convinced that the cosmos was born in a single massive explosion, and doubters were left out on the fringe...