Word: strident
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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yawping. n. a strident or prattling utterance, "moldy characters and philosophical yawpings about life...
Under these static circumstances, the play is not the thing, or even a play. Essentially, Happy Days is a monologue by a compulsive talker. A strident school bell signals the times when Winnie must wake and sleep; in between comes the terrible recess of endurance, the "happy day" to be survived. She utters a prayer, sings a song, chews the nostalgic cud of memory. Actress Ruth White, though she plays her role with more gallantry than Beckett's morgue-attendant austerities call for, stars vocally: she croons, keens, gurgles, fumes and screams at her all-but-silent partner...
Revealing List. Mencken strikes the same strident tone in the 400 letters culled by Editor Forgue from his massive correspondence of 15,000. "Of my inventions," he once wrote, "I am vainest of Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound and Boobus americanus." The list is revealing. It bears the date and the outdatedness of the '20s, along with such storied fossils as bathtub gin, the Black Bottom and the Stutz Bearcat. The fate of a successful iconoclast is to be buried with the icons he smashed...
Moscow's millions knew something was afoot even as they awoke and dressed for work one morning last week. The radio was droning out the full text of a long government communiqué. First came the strident buildup: "The United States and its allies are fanning up the arms race . . . preparing a new world holocaust while the Soviet government strives for peace. The Soviet Union considers it its duty to take all necessary measures...'' Slowly, as the high-charge prose unwound, the reason for all the excitement began to dawn on the Muscovites: the Kremlin had decided...
...Reasonable. These strident remarks, which made the world's headlines, were mostly passed on the vodka circuit, in those little diplomatic huddles that are the Soviet equivalent of Meet the Press. Many of the remarks were more muted by the time they were printed in Pravda. What Khrushchev wanted to convey to his own people was delivered earlier in a formal nationwide radio and television address, scrupulously similar in staging, and even in tone, to the previous week's "fireside chat'' by President John Kennedy. Natty in silk tie and bemedaled grey striped suit, Russia...