Word: spunk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There was good news for Haydn-lovers last week: nine symphonies (of the composer's massive crop of 104) were released by three different companies. From Boston's Haydn Society, on three LP records (6 sides) came seven which are seldom heard, performed with more spunk than spirit by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Jonathan Sternberg. Most interesting of the seven: Haydn's First, composed when he was 27, and his Thirteenth ("Jupiter"), which seems to reflect his happiness with his new job as musicmaker at the Esterhazys, a job he held for 30 years. Also...
...dowdy (though brilliant) history professor, Georges Bidault suddenly blossomed out after liberation as a dapper diplomat and statesman. Britain's Ernest Bevin had once patronizingly called him "this dear little man," but Bidault had been almost the only one in Charles de Gaulle's postliberation entourage with spunk enough to argue against the stiff-backed general. Son of a devoutly Catholic, well-to-do insurance broker, Georges Bidault had sided with the Spanish Loyalists, denounced Munich and become a top executive in the French underground. Before he married in 1945, he seemed to have almost no private life...
...Adequate" is probably the best adjective to describe the 1948-1949 edition of the freshman basketball team. Its record is scarcely awe-inspiring (two losses out of six), but if spunk and alertness are criteria of good basketball performance the Yearlings are having a successful season...
...Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had definite ideas on the best way to cure warts. Tom favored "spunk-water" (rain water in a rotten tree stump). One of Huck's favorite prescriptions required a dead cat: "Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about midnight when somebody wicked has been buried; and when it's midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three . . . and when they're taking the feller away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow...
That fearless group of Bostonians that call themselves the Tributary Players, and have, for the past eight years, been steadily putting spunk into Shakespeare, can take almost everything but being called either an amateur group or a Little Theater outfit...