Word: stomachful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...thickly populated with individualists. Several months ago, a Londoner named J. R. B. Branson wrote to the Times, suggesting that it would be a good idea for Britishers to learn to eat fresh green grass. Mr. Walter Elliott, the British Minister of Health, was not amused. The human stomach, said he stiffly, cannot digest grass...
When Mr. Branson, a vegetarian, first sampled grass, he had a little trouble with his stomach. A merely temporary obstacle. "I passed down word by 'autosuggestion' to my body-building staff," wrote he, "that I wanted them to sample a new form of 'building material' . . . and I boldly 'steamed ahead.' " Beginning with a few choice blades at each meal, he gradually worked up to over five ounces of fodder a day, can now "fearlessly consume any type of meadow grass." He collects fresh mowings, washes them tenderly, sets them...
...wild-goose chase after poetical wisdom-a chase that did not end before the goose was caught, cooked and eaten. How Yeats swallowed his bird-beak, bones and feathers-he has told in detail in his classic Autobiography. How the meal sat on his stomach is made plain in his motley, fearful, sometimes scabrous, more often superb Last Poems & Plays...
...Mahan, the 19th-Century theorist of naval power. He here repeats the performance at greater length, with more savage relish. The navy man's Moses, it appears, was a thoroughly incompetent historian, his imperialist strategy "the rationalized war passion of a frustrated swivel-chair officer who had no stomach for the hard work of navigation and fighting." As for Roosevelt I, whose election was a "tragedy of politics," and Secretary of State John Hay, who "as Lincoln's secretary had become a treasure of the Republican tradition," they and their friends "built up in the State Department...
Melville, who knew the world, could stomach neither Transcendentalism nor the common democratic optimism of his day. In a whaler's forecastle he learned the worst about human nature, in the vast and empty sea he discerned the unknowable mystery of God, in the earthly paradise of the South Seas cannibalism reminded him of evil. He concluded, says Gabriel, that "he who would be a man must stop running with the Christians to the everlasting arms, must cease deluding himself with Emerson that the constitution of the universe is on his side." Democracy he saw as a moment...