Word: rheum
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Rhubarb (as defined by the Random House College Dictionary--a must for the true Harvard sports fan of 1959): 1. any polygonaceous herb of the genus Rheum, as R. officinale, having a medicinal rhizome, and R. Rhaponticum, having edible leafstalks. (No, that's not it.) 2. the rhizome of any medicinal species of this plant, forming a combined cathartic and astringent. (That ain't it, either.) 3. the edible fleshy leafstalks of any of the garden species. (That's gross) 4. U.S. Slang. a quarrel or a squabble. (Bingo...
There was plenty of rheum at the top. During the coal strike, White House Press Secretary Jody Powell discussed hardships in the "ECAR region." When reporters asked about the acronym, Powell blurted, "That is a little bureaucratic jargon I picked up. I don't know what it means." He and others learned that the acronym stands for East Central Reliability Council, a group of utility companies. They were to learn more from Representative Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, who wrote his constituents: "Air Force to do EIS on PAVE PAWS." Translation: there was to be an environmental impact statement about...
...evenings after supper I hate him least, when the rheum in his blind eyes looks less like weakness, an impassive twilight severity in his backbone. He sits alone as I am alone, feeling the heat of the sand warm the sun-fallen...
...sure cure for it-and generally the same cure. With no legal restrictions, the patent medicine men made limitless claims. One ointment boasted that it could cure "ague in the face, swelled breasts, sore nipples, bronchitis, sore throats, quinsy, croup, felons, ringworms, burns, scalds, shingles, erysipelas, salt rheum, piles, inflammation of the eyes and bowels, bruises, fresh cut wounds, bilious cholic, scrofulous and milk-leg sores, inflammatory rheumatism and gout." Such was the gilded age of the patent medicine in America, as told by Historian Gerald Carson in One for a Man, Two for a Horse, published last week (Doubleday...
...launched a bitter broadside at the newly-appointed President of Harvard Mrs. Pusey probably needed all the equanimity she could garner. The junior senator from Wisconsin was never one to give up a grudge, nor Pusey one to run away from a fight; and the Senator's flow of rheum continued. "At first," Mrs. Pusey recalls, "Senator McCarthy wasn't interested in the President of Lawrence College. But the President of Harvard, he knew, was someone who would get him national coverage." She recollects having met McCarthy only once, a youngish, nondescript man on a railroad train parlor...