Word: taverner
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Swing Low. In Havant, England, after vigorous debate, the Tavern Licensing Board ruled that taverns may play radios on Sundays, but only if tuned to British broadcasts, complained that foreign stations might play records that are "too high-spirited and jazzy...
...France's youngest Deputy, a handsome, tough tavern brawler with a law degree, a kind of lowbrow intellectual primitive who is currently the darling of Paris café society. Son of a fisherman, he won a scholarship to study law in Paris, cut an impressive swath through the Latin Quarter's bistros and student clubs. After graduation, he volunteered for service in Indo-China as a parachutist ("I was tired of amateur fighting"), but got there too late to fight...
...Come live with me and be my love"), a long narrative poem (Hero and Leander), and four superb poetic dramas: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II. A militant atheist, in flight from arrest, he was killed at 29 during a drunken brawl in a riverside tavern near London, probably a political victim of Queen Elizabeth's Secret Service...
Never a scholar, Hague was expelled from school before finishing the sixth grade, went to work at the Erie roundhouse. He came to the attention of Ned Kenny, tavern operator and a factional leader in Jersey City's Second Ward. In 1896 Kenny was involved in a fight with a rival saloonkeeper-politician, and wanted somebody to put up for Second Ward constable. He picked young Frank Hague, gave him $80 and told him to "use your head." Hague did, won the election, went on from there...
...origins of many nursery rhymes are shrouded in the fumes of taverns and mughouses, in a day when English ale and language were both stronger than they are now. How the songs got from the tavern to the nursery has never been quite clear, except that in the 17th and 18th centuries adults were far less squeamish about what was fit for children's ears than they are today. (Later, of course, many of the songs were expurgated and tied with pink and blue ribbons.) Often as not, nursery-rhyme characters were said to have had real counterparts, ranging...