Word: spun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From 1681 to 1840-while Shakespeare spun in his grave-London theatergoers saw, and enjoyed, King Lear with a happy ending. In a version by Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, which used most of Shakespeare's plot and many of his lines, it was played by such theatrical greats as David Garrick and Edmund Kean, and applauded by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Even Charles Lamb, who disliked the happy-ending version, conceded that it had a certain stageworthiness when he wrote: "Tate has put his hook in ... this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers ... to draw it about more easily...
Last week's $2,000 top prize went to a competent 56-year-old second-rater named Edouard Goerg, whose Nativity with Birds was as sweet and fuzzy as spun candy. The second prize ($1,500), third prize ($1,000), and seven $750 honorable mentions all went to painters who were comparatively unknown in the U.S. Next autumn, Goerg's prizewinner will be brought to Manhattan to compete with U.S. entries for a $3,500 grand prize...
...gaudy carousel spun itself down onto the stage floor and suddenly, over the combined voices of 30 singers, a 75-piece orchestra and the world's biggest organ, brilliant explosions banged across the stage sky. For two minutes, while Leonidoff flailed his arms like a man rooting home a winning horse, the sky erupted rockets, pinwheels and aerial bombs...
...bespectacled youth poked a pugnacious finger in my collar and said: 'Will you tell your American friends that we reject the plans of murderer Truman and American imperialists to start another war so they can use cheap soldiers of India to crush Soviet democracy?' Breathlessly he spun out the usual cliches, and wound up: 'Nehru is a Fascist reactionary who smokes cigarettes with Churchill and offers British warmongers the sweet mangoes and sweet tongues of India...
...Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain's George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 (which, along with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain -see below-is the Book-of-the-Month Club's selection for July), there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell's utterly depressing vision...