Word: russianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Soviet Union last week gave an answer that was no answer at all to a strongly implied U.S. charge that Russian planes had committed an act of aerial piracy...
Toward the end of the 19th century, a newcomer of obscure and disputed origin appeared in England from beyond the Channel. Called Russian whist or biritch (soon anglicized into bridge), the new game differed from standard whist in two ways: the dealer named trumps, or passed the privilege across the table to his partner, and the dealer's partner became dummy, laying down his hand for all to see. London whist players who tried the new game soon noted that the exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British...
...younger, hungrier Charles Goren sniped at Ely Culbertson. Ely, cried Goren in the early days, was all through-and had never been really great anyhow. The inner drive that carried Charlie Goren past Culbertson was sharpened by the rough edges of poverty in his Philadelphia childhood. The son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants, he grew up in a brawling district of "Jews, Irish and Irish." Charlie made up for small size with pugnacity, endurance, and indifference to pain. Recalls his brother Edward, a Philadelphia clothing distributor: "Charlie walked around with mumps for two weeks and never knew it. People kept...
...Russian Whist. It took a long international evolution to produce modern bridge, with its beautiful balances between competition and cooperation, system and psychology. The ancestral game of whist, which still survives in English and New England villages, was bridge without bidding: the trump suit was decided on by turning up the last card dealt. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of whist: "Men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous." But with no bidding and no exposed hand to guide the players, the game was crude...
...Russian-born Ely Culbertson, gifted with a real talent for cards and an absolute genius for personal publicity. His Contract Bridge Blue Book leaped to the bestseller lists in 1931, sold more than 1,000,000 copies within a few years...