Word: quaintness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Among the French this extravagant exaltation of cookery leads occasionally to quaint results...
Seven centuries ago there was a generation of children who, having observed their elders' repeated failure to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel Saracens by brute force, resorted to the quaint expedient of trudging down across Europe, struggling over the Mediterranean Sea and advancing upon Jerusalem with hands empty of weapons and hearts full of faith. It is not recorded that the Saracen militia were deeply affected by this display, nor that they yielded their stronghold until, some time afterwards, Frederick II ousted them by adroit diplomacy. Nevertheless, the tradition that young people make good auxiliary forces...
Mode-arbiter Condé Nast made quaint obeisance this month to Quakery by decreeing as first "special issue" of Vanity Fair ever published, a Sesquicentennial Number. Though the Sesquicentennial achieves little prominence except its mention on the cover, an arraignment of Manhattan's last theatrical season in 67 compressed capsules of reproof give to the issue an appropriate Quaker tone. Mr. George Jean Nathan, a critic steeped in theatre lore, discerning though scurrilous, able though loud, composed the 67 indictments with nice variety of language. A few follow...
Marshal Saxe: "It is impossible not to admire (although he once set out to invade England) that high-spirited batard de Roi, Marshal Saxe. ... To wrap it up pleasantly, in the quaint language of the turf, he would have started 100 to 1, and no takers, for the Continence Gold Cup. . . . His father (Augustus the Strong) was well called the Strong: he had 353 illegitimate children...
...Cossacks. He had painted the grim mountains of Montenegro and the bright Balkans beyond, and if you went with him to his studio he had some very clever portrait work to show you, both in color and in black-and-white. He would tell you, with a quaint mixture of genuine Slavic dignity and bursting childish delight, of how his work had taken on with patrons in Philadelphia, then Rochester, Cleveland, Chicago, Lancaster, Pa., and lately in Manhattan...