Word: tartly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...court. When Shaw died at an un-mellowed 94 in 1950, he had made a bequest to provide a handsome subsidy to renovate the English alphabet. A hater of diphthongs and illogical pronunciations, Alphabetterer Shaw wanted the ABCs stretched to 40 letters on a one-sound, one-letter plan. Tart-tongued Lady Astor took one look at her old friend's idea and pronounced it ridiculous. The British Museum, one of Shaw's three institutional heirs, now wants the court to quash Shaw's bizarre bequest on the ground that a newfangled alphabet would not benefit...
When California's mammoth Transamerica holding company sold the last of its interest in Bank of America in 1952, no one was more gratified than tart-tongued Marriner S. Eccles. As chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Eccles had pushed divorce for nearly ten years. Eccles' family's First Security Corp. had long reigned as "the largest banking institution in the intermountain states" of Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. After the divorce of Transamerica and Bank of America, it looked as if neither would be able to invade that territory...
...damned attitude kept slipping through. Although 63% of the New Haven's business comes from passengers, McGinnis has an illconcealed conviction that commuters are a liability. He has seemed to go out of his way to aggravate every bad situation and antagonize the commuters with his own tart comments. Items...
...until one day, in France, he goes AWOL to fight with a rifle at the front. Thereupon he discovers he is not a courageous man. Instead of accepting this as a not unusual fact, young Shelby is full of shame. Before long, he is stealing penicillin to pay a tart, and is on his way Stateside to a psychiatric hospital. Cruelty and, worst of all, a kind of shambling mindlessness mark his downfall...
...stories are mentally furnished in something better than Farrell's caveman modern. Kilroy Was Here is an evocative, semi-autobiographical prowl among the littered streets and crumbling tenements of Farrell's boyhood on Chicago's South Side. Tart as melting aspirin on the tongue, it lives up to its tag line, "Kilroy was here but left because the place stank." A Baptism in Italy takes a tender look at a beat-up Italian writer-revolutionary who is punchdrunk from too many rounds in a concentration camp. He rouses himself to play gracious host to a sympathetic pair...