Word: scroogian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...once said, was "to know the electric chair without death." The danger signal was an open-palmed slap, slap, slap on the bald dome, often followed by the saliva-flecked roar, "You are a broken reed I" If Gulbenkian was something of a solid gold Scrooge, he also had Scroogian fears. According to Young, the sordid 1920 murder of a Manhattan pawnbroker named Gulbenkian, no kin, scared him out of ever visiting the U.S. He reputedly kept a ton and a half of gold in his London safes, presumably against a rainy day. An electrified barricade surrounded his Paris home...
...Dickens was not overly sentimental, he insists; the modern age is simply too hardboiled. Echoing Matthew Arnold on Keats, Biographer Johnson says of Dickens: "He is with Shakespeare." But Shakespeare's is the company Dickens rarely keeps. Shakespeare's characters grow; Dickens' characters only have Scroogian turnabouts. Where a Hamlet, a Captain Ahab or an Ivan Karamazov helps the reader to know himself, most of Dickens' fabulous folk reveal only their inimitable selves. They teach little, but, with the help of Dickens' beguiling gusto, they still make good reading and pretty good movies...
Descending to Scroogian depths, the Housemasters celebrated Yuletide by considering till further slashes in students' opportunities to entertain. Apparently, it isn't enough to castrate three hours each afternoon. Football Saturdays, where the seven until eleven privilege is most needed, may well lose those hours, too. This is by no means official yet, but one can hear Marley's chains already, clanking gloomily in the restructures' minds...
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