Word: sailor
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Last week Fuzzy Wuzzy (Osman Digna, called "The Ugly") died in Wadi Haifa, Egypt. He was 90. He had spent 22 years in prison, more than 20 years slave trading, some 25 years fighting. His father was a Scottish sailor or Beelzebub. Perhaps he had an Arab mother, or perhaps his mother was a Turk. Nobody is sure. History recognizes only that ugly Osman Digna* spent his boyhood and adolescence helping his parents sell slaves. The Digna family was very rich. In 1882 the British again forbade slave-trading. The Dervish Mahdi proclaimed a Holy War and Osman Digna, brown...
...sustains his erring child by letter; providentially he injects the solvent of good nature into the too-feminine atmosphere of his spacious home. With his morning flower in its accustomed place, his quizzical brows alert, his disquieting remarks and bright-eyed scheming, his gait still reminiscent of the sailor's roll, he is the captain of his hearth, steady in domestic storm as in the days when (before magnatehood) he spoked the wheels of tall ships. The family bark reaches harbor battered but safe...
...have been in the Navy continuously more than 39 years and never heard the word used as referring to a sailor until during the recent World War. It is only the recruits or some new men in the service that do not object to the use of the term. All the officers and 90% of the men regard the word as an insult on account of its offensive real meaning...
...therefore request that you do not use the word again as meaning a sailor, or if you believe in its use after reading the above that you do not send me any copy of your paper in which it is used. Feeling sure that you will see the justice of the foregoing, and wishing success to your paper without the use of any such offensive terms...
Samuel G. Blythe, famed Saturday Evening Post writer, once wrote: "A gob is a sailor, a man of the American navy, a bluejacket, and the term is self-applied." TIME preferring the authority of Admiral-Subscriber Irwin, will relegate the word to the category of objectionable slang...