Word: quaintness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...correspondence seldom strayed far from his own predicament, but it was rarely tedious and frequently charming. A meeting with Yeats produced a conflict between Frost's sharp literary sense ("the man of the last 20 years in English poetry") and his common sense. Yeats thought rural matters quaint and believed in leprechauns, and Frost had just spent nine years rooting stones out of his New Hampshire pasture without any converse with the spirit world. There is a wonderful raspberry at Carl Sandburg ("His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none...
Western visitors are also well advised to bone up on local folklore. In the Yugoslav mountains, a stag shoot is followed by a quaint little ceremony in which the hunter bends over with his head between the horns and tries to answer three riddles posed by the guide...
...uniformed boy scouts. Hotels were jammed with 130,000 foreign tourists hard put to take in all the shrines, nightclubs and kabuki shows. Special police squad cars manned by a corps of smiling interpreters cruised the city searching for the lost, or merely bewildered-looking foreigners. Quaint old Japanese customs were put aside to make sure that Tokyo presented only its most decorous face to the visitors-five people were summarily arrested for urinating in the streets-and signs in the subways carefully instructed young chosans in the mysterious ways of the West with polite reminders that "lady-first etiquette...
...country is all about. Some, of course, go too far, end up reverse snobs who can easily afford to stay at a spanking-clean, well-located "name" hotel, but would rather die than pass up the "typical English" atmosphere offered, for not a single shilling less, by a quaint old inn that is not only musty and dusty but also assures its guests that the bathroom will be a good long hike away down the hall...
...that the history of the Shrine was invented after its founding, and has been elaborated ever since. The fact seems to be that one of the 13 founders happened to have made a trip to the Middle East just before the historic meeting, and thought the Arabs were quaint and Mecca romantic. And in a country of egalitarians, there is something about titles like "Imperial Potentate" or "Grand Chief Rabban" that can make any true democrat tingle...