Word: spinster
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...humanizing process, Charles Boyer developed his part of the self-continued husband who had no purpose in life other than proving his prowess of seduction into that of a warm, likeable person. His interest in Janet Spencer, a spinster who had retreated to an aesthetic world, arose from an intellectual affinity he had never found in his invalid, self-pitying wife. Miss Spencer poisoned the wife assuming that she thus freed the husband for herself. It actually freed him to marry an eighteen year old girl with whom he had been having an affair...
...slight, silver-haired spinster boarded a plane for Africa last week on a strange errand. Esther Cummings was off to visit Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan and the Belgian Congo, to put in practice a phonetic language-learning system she had been taught by her missionary father. With it, she thought she could get the hang of any native tongue in three or four days. Her mission (sponsored by the United and Southern Presbyterian Boards): to teach the natives how to teach their own languages to the missionaries...
...centuries, France's spinsters (technically all unmarried women over 25) have cut loose once a year on the day of their saint (who was a spinster herself). Last week, according to custom, the procession of "Catherinettes" (composed largely of midinettes in crazy headgear) stampeded to the saint's statue on the garish Boulevard St.-Denis. An old tradition permitted all men to kiss any spinster they encountered on St. Catherine's Day, but this was outlawed by some busybody reformers in 1933; last week, as usual, the 1933 prohibition was roundly ignored...
...name the spade, anything. Briefly, the movie niece (Susan Hayward) is young, has led a void life caring for the old lady (Agnes Moorehead), has compensated by poring over the poet's letters, has conceived a coy necrophilia for him. By day she is the cold spinster, by night ah! with her kitten and her finch and that sill ver oubliette which holds the letters (sweet counterfeits of passion!), she is indeed a very Mab of love. The publishing fellow (Robert Cummings), sniffing out the letters, blunders into her dream, effects a gentle transfer of her affects...
...last week, wrote Columnist Billy Rose, "a daffy story popped up on my desk" (the kidney-shaped one in the office Flo Ziegfeld used to use). It seemed, wrote Rose, that somebody's spinster Aunt Helen had died, and when the minister drew back the casket lid at the funeral, what should be inside but the uniformed corpse of a two-star general? The embarrassed undertaker said they might as well go ahead with the service. Aunt Helen had apparently been buried in Arlington Cemetery that morning, and only an act of Congress could...