Word: shiv
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great acting challenges of the modern theater. None of the actresses who have played Shaw's Joan on Broadway-Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Uta Hagen-has left a lasting stamp upon the role. At the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shiv-awn) McKenna brought something a good deal more memorable to it. Her thick-brogued, almost blatantly peasantlike Joan was all drive and no dreaminess. She had an unshakable faith in her voices and her mission because it could never occur to her to doubt them; hers was a kind of fanatic...
...school-tie sportsmanship, the bullyboys and tearaways in "The Smoke"−as England's capital is known to its criminals−reciprocate by settling their private differences in an equally quiet way, with razor blades half-buried in potatoes or the point of a razor-sharp shiv. Last week London's sensational penny press was black with scare headlines suggesting that gang warfare of a cruder type had come to The Smoke. Four men had pulled up in a car before a dingy boarding house in Maida Vale, crossed the sidewalk in broad daylight, entered the house...
...King Arthur a gentleman, or was he a sort of Legs Diamond of the early Middle Ages? Was it the age of chivalry or the age of the shiv? Were the "parfit gentil knights" of the Round Table just a passel of paleo-Stalinist thugs? Henry Treece, English poet, critic and historical novelist (The Dark Island), wields a mean historic mace and it lands squarely on the romantic Arthurian legend of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. "Malory was wrong," says Novelist Treece flatly. He admits that his own hard-boiled debunking may be no less wrong...
...with them) and by Methodism (which tamed the hard-drinking cowhands). At this point in the book, the apparatus of scholarship gets to work. The reader is told that a cowboy seldom fought with a gun and never with his fists, but elected what the modern delinquent calls a shiv (knife); that most of the gunplay in Dodge City was caused by non-cowboys; that Billy the Kid was a product of New York's Bowery; that Calamity Jane claimed that she never went to bed sober...
When he emerged, public opinion in Cell Block D had hardened against him; last December a fellow prisoner sidled up and slit El Sapo's belly open with a homemade shiv. It was a near thing, and for weeks El Sapo lay in the prison hospital with nothing to do but think. Finally he sent for the warden and made a momentous announcement: "General, I want to go straight. I am not going to kill anyone any more." Cell Block D, on the whole, was glad to hear...