Word: swankest
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives...
...Monica and Long Beach certain long, low rods of red light glowing steadily through the Pacific nights have marked the positions of California's "floating casinos," the gambling ships Rex, Texas, Showboat and Tango. Rows of scarlet neon lights picked them out from stem to stern. Largest and swankest was the Rex, an old, British-built square-rigger, formerly the collier Kenilworth. She was demasted, equipped with a 400-foot saloon on her main deck containing roulette wheels, crap boards, tables for chemin de fer, chuck-a-luck, anything else a gambler's heart might crave. Below were...
...before racing with William Woodward. He likes to win races. When his turf career was crowned last year by Flares' (son of Gallant Fox) victory in the Ascot Gold Cup, the longest (2½ mi.) important flat race in the world,* Owner Woodward made a proud round of Manhattan's swankest clubs. But William Woodward had been breeding horses for 13 years before he began racing them...
Pleased too was the swart, chunky gentleman for whom this swankest military State reception in Washington history had been staged by Franklin Roosevelt, He was only General Anastasio Somoza, President of little Nicaragua (pop. 1,133,000), but this show for him was in all details precisely the reception planned for King George & Queen Elizabeth of mighty Great Britain next month. Fact that it was a dress rehearsal for that occasion did not diminish the fact that it came first, that it was as handsome a performance as any Latin-American heart could desire, that it was a gesture intended...
...temper and loss of dignity and some old bankers called him a radical. But when he was defeated for re-election in 1914, he resumed an orderly Cleveland career, as chairman of the Morris Plan Bank, ardent supporter of local opera, squire of a lakefront estate in Bratenahl, swankest of the city's 41 suburbs. The angel of Ohio's Democracy during the lean '20s, he asserted himself by running for an unexpired Senate term as a Wet in 1930, won by so large a margin that he was talked of for the 1932 Presidential nomination...