Word: scabrously
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MEET JOHNNY, THE INTELLIGENT, NIHIListic protagonist of Naked. The first view of him could not be more savage. In a dark, scabrous alley he has shoved a woman against a wall and is raping her. For the next two hours, he stumbles through a London nighttown of despairing, inarticulate souls, watching with embittered eyes and delivering mordant, nonstop opinions on everything from Homer to Nostradamus to the Berlin Wall. When last seen, he has been severely beaten and is limping down the middle of a suburban street in an eerie dance to nowhere. As he says, there are plenty...
Illness and disease remained in constant residence. Tuberculosis was endemic, and so were scabrous skin diseases of every kind: abscesses, cankers, scrofula, tumors, eczema and erysipelas. In a throwback to biblical times, lepers constituted a class of pariahs living on the outskirts of villages and cities. Constant famine, rotten flour and vitamin deficiencies afflicted huge segments of society with blindness, goiter, paralysis and bone malformations that created hunchbacks and cripples. A man was lucky to survive 30, and 50 was a ripe old age. Most women, many of them succumbing to the ravages of childbirth, lived less than 30 years...
...Talk Dirty and Influence People. In the book's foreword, critic Kenneth Tynan praised Bruce as "an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private." But Bruce suffered for that trust. His scabrous truth telling got him arrested in the U.S. and evicted from Britain. He died in 1966, perhaps the last American performer for whom notoriety was not a career move...
Gays have long gossiped about which public figures of past and present might be secret homosexuals. Publications from the scholarly to the semi-scabrous have speculated about the likes of Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Willa Cather and James Dean, with hundreds of others cited along the way. This name dropping is defended as a way of giving the gay community role models and a sense of continuity. When the rumors involve living people, however, discussion about who is "in the closet" has generally been held to a discreet murmur -- partly in deference to libel laws but mostly in defense...
Public mores may have changed over the past three decades, but the press still finds itself trapped by the rituals that govern its coverage of scabrous gossip. Today the journalistic rules of righteous rumormongering have been liberalized, even though the results in the form of tarnished reputations often remain all too familiar. Leading newspapers and the television networks are less likely to permit the wire services to do their dirty work for them. Instead, the new, more permissive approach allows them to write and broadcast artfully crafted stories about the rumors themselves, thereby spreading calumny while piously decrying...