Word: squeezer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...homing instinct for the essentials in a complex situation. He is a master of the art of brain-picking-and of choosing the right brain to pick. From careful homework, he knows precisely what information his story needs, and can extract it with the efficiency of an automatic orange squeezer...
...Waste Land (since dismissed by him as "bogus scholarship"), he writes: "The method is to take a well-known poem . . . analyze it stanza by stanza and line by line, and extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning out of it. It might be called the lemon-squeezer school of criticism...
Without benefit of lemon-squeezer, longtime Critic Eliot (The Sacred Wood, After Strange Gods) distills the essential similarities of two works centuries apart, Paradise Lost and Finnegans Wake: "Two books by great blind musicians, each writing a language of his own based upon English." Only once does he commit one of those calculated critical indiscretions of his Young Turk days when he dubbed Hamlet a "failure." Immersed in recent years in the poetic drama, Eliot permits himself the absurdity of suggesting that the early verse plays of Yeats "are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw...
...Sydney. Australia, Phyllis Newton was fined $116 after she waylaid her husband on his return from a swim, pelted him with fruit, brass ashtrays, a doorstop, an electric iron, a lemon squeezer, a portable radio and a radiator, then cut up his new suit with a razor and burned his swimming trunks in the stove...
Push Button. The Berlin squeezer was used at full pressure in 1948-49 (when it was broken by the airlift), and at half pressure in 1951, after the West proposed West German rearmament. Last week the Kremlin pushed the button again...