Word: slattern
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Deriding the claims of old-fashioned sociologists and asking "What's wrong with this picture?" (see cut), Mr. Sheinfeld points out that the differences between the "worthy Quakeress and the feeble-minded slattern" cannot account for the differences between the two Kallikak clans. For Old Horror, who was presumably feebleminded, could not, by the law of genetics, have inherited his feeble mind from one parent alone. Only "recessive" genes are involved in feeblemindedness, "which means that such genes must come from both parents for the effect to assert itself." Hence "the worthy Martin Kallikak Sr., himself...
...Rockaway, Long Island one summer day 19 years ago, a tipsy slattern wove into the chop suey restaurant of Fung Kwok-dong, plunked down on a table a naked boy infant, offered to sell him for $1. Fung Kwok-dong impassively handed over a dollar bill. Two years later when the mother tried to get her son back Fung Kwok-dong went to court, won legal possession. The white babe was legally adopted and given the name Fung Kwok-keung...
...Merivale is now sad because he is a small-town English nonconformist parson who has to live in a ghastly house with a leaking roof, put up with a whining wife, stand for any amount of bulldozing from his parishioners and much bad cooking from a gabbling, ill-trained slattern. He is sadder when one of his younger parishioners runs away. He is a little more cheerful when he goes after her and falls in love with her, but then he is much sadder than ever when she is killed in an off-stage railway wreck from which he escapes...
...book ends. Around his story revolve those of his kinspeople: Uncle Al is a shoe-salesman, a zealous defender of banal ideas and a tyrannical foster-father; Brother Bill is a sneak thief who has acquired a great store of misinformation about sex; Mother Lizz is a hard-hitting slattern whose great regret is that she did not become a nun; Aunt Margaret is a well-built hotel cashier whose love affair with a lumberman lifts her into the world of affairs and drives her to drink. The only warm-hearted character in the book is Jim O'Neill...
...years to get there. On the voyage they were captured by Algerian pirates, and Cervantes' prized letters got him the uncomfortable honor of being held for an impossibly high ransom. Back in Spain he found various ways of nearly starving, loved a slut who left him, married a slattern whom he gladly left. As a middle-aged tax collector for Philip's insatiable treasury Cervantes might have ended his weary days. But he fell foul of his superiors, was arrested for embezzlement and clapped into the big jail at Seville. There, with the scum of Spain...