Word: spit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Once upon a time there was a poor man. He was not meek in spirit, but lazy, mean, vituperative and usually drunk. He stood all day long, a beggar, by the church in a little French town, and when anyone gave him alms, he was apt to curse and spit and swipe at them with his stick for thanks. Everybody despised him, and he despised everybody...
Wyndham Lewis knows only one way to use a pen-as a spit. Over hissing coals of satire and irony, the British author-artist has broiled intellectual quacks (The Apes of God), ailing civilizations (Time and Western Man), and his own middle-class countrymen (Rotting Hill). Like Bernard Shaw, he outraged Britons in the '303 by following the trail of a sawdust Caesar, Adolf Hitler. But in 1937, when Shaw was busy touting Superman Stalin, Lewis became one of the first writers to bare the tyrannic fraud of Communism in a novel called The Revenge for Love. By ripping...
...book she has not only viewed etiquette as a cradle-to-the-grave proposition, but turned out advice (most of it highly sensible) on almost every conceivable aspect of life. Amid voluminous dissertations on manners she does not hesitate to write: "Nothing, not even a bad clam, is ever spit, however surreptitiously, into a napkin. But it is sheer masochism to down . . . something really spoiled." What to do? She suggests depositing partly chewed food with the fork on the side of the plate, to be quickly "screened" thereafter with celery or bread. Other items...
...legislation which had to be dealt with before the 82nd Congress could adjourn for the last time. Night after night, a small light under the statue on the Capitol dome burned brightly, indicating that Congress was at work. In the House chamber, weary Speaker Sam Rayburn, pausing only to spit with experienced accuracy into his goboon, cleared hundreds of routine bills with incessant repetition of the magic words:' "Without objection, so ordered...
...took a hard look at his cheap-jackery, and resolved to do better. He calmly decided, as he said, to "swallow" his time and spit it out again in a series of 20 long novels about the Rougon-Macquart, in which all the main characters were the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of one oversexed farm wench. For his series he invented a new ism, based on close, pessimistic observation of mankind, and called it Naturalism. But Zola no more believed in Naturalism than he did in God, Wilson concludes. The important thing was this: "I, I alone will be Naturalism...