Word: rat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Through the years, even the name went through strange evolutions. Simla Vulpina (fox-monkey), after Martyr's description, turned out to be the Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum...
...Sparreholm, Sweden, Emil Elmvall, determined to chase a rat out from behind his car's upholstery, filled the car with acetylene gas, caused an explosion which blew the car top over a two-story house, shattered 300 windowpanes and injured...
Together, the two children play at the reality they know best: sudden and violent death. Solemnly, at "an old mill presided over by an ancient owl, they build a little cemetery. There they first bury Paulette's puppy, then a chick, a mole, a ladybird, a rat, a lizard and a cockroach (which Michel impales on a pen while imitating the terrifying sound of a German dive bomber). They even steal crosses from a real cemetery for their animal burial ground...
...impressed by these magic signs that he spares Wilbur, who lives fattily ever after. Author White (who lives on his own Maine farm) also does a fine job on farmyard life as seen through the eyes of geese and sheep, and reaches his peak with a scurrilous rat named Templeton who, like Satan in Paradise Lost, pretty nearly steals the show...
...found just what he was looking for. Young first offenders, as he wrote last week, were locked up in filthy, verminous cells with second and third offenders, dope addicts and sexual degenerates. One aged psychopath, who screamed all night, four days after his release committed suicide by taking rat poison. For exercise, his cellmates' chief amusement was to strip to the waist and beat one another black & blue. Young prisoners staged "aspirin" parties to get "high" by grinding up aspirin and tobacco which they rolled into cigarettes. Not satisfied, they took a fling with dope, buying it through...