Word: synonyms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Treks. The provinces have been booming ever since the blitz drove actors out of London, and an evacuee audience with them. Towns like Bath, Cheltenham, Exeter, formerly one-night stands, now have A-1 ratings. Wigan, Lancashire (long a music-hall synonym for the end of the earth) recently had a full-fledged drama festival. Transportation for actors is by rail, and the same as for ordinary citizens -cramped, slow, supperless...
...word gingerbread" as a synonym for superfluity is a grievous error. . . . From antiquity, gingerbread was a ceremonial food and regarded as an appropriate sacrifice to the gods. ... As such it was ... often prepared in fanciful shapes and elaborately gilded. It was from this archaic custom that the expression developed, "the gilt is off the gingerbread. . . ." But mark you, it was the gilt that was "off," the gingerbread remained...
...light of history, therefore, it's difficult to understand how such a well-beloved, common, staple food should suffer the indignity of being used as a synonym for something nonessential...
...Lone Wolf. The first to mobilize was Tom Girdler. His career of devil-may-care unpopularity had come to a climax in a 1940 Roosevelt campaign speech, when the President used his name as a synonym for enemy-of-the-people. Shortly thereafter Girdler put out feelers to Washington and decided to quit fighting C.I.O. That was now kid stuff; the big leaguers were fighting Hitler...
...difficult to wade through the frothy odds and ends to find anything of more than trifling musical interest. Even banking on past reputations one is likely to collide with Bob Crosby's excellent band providing background music for a paltry vocal trio. Or one finds Benny Goodman, the synonym for jazz to perhaps too many these days, experimenting to find something new, in dance music, as his publicity announces, and coming up with two of the most profoundly horrisonous (an obsolete word which must be taken out of mothballs for the occasion) vocalists of our generation...