Word: teething
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...18th century, cosmetics and perfumes had become so popular that the English Parliament passed a law declaring that any woman who "shall impose upon, seduce and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects by virtue of scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty against witchcraft, and the marriage . . . shall be null and void...
Executive mouth is not limited to jobs with tension, says Dr. Lynch; even manual laborers with a strong drive to succeed may take their troubles out on their teeth. The executive-mouth victim might conceivably "be a ditchdigger who gets frustrated because he wants to dig better ditches, and somehow...
...much. But what was I going to do with them?" The hipster is also estranged from nature. In George Mandel's The Beckoning Sea, the suicide-bent hero runs screaming along a beach, and "with a roar the ocean came up and bit at him with its foam-teeth...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
...roommates got thrown out for heaving a stink bomb at a freshman dance, and the third left because he couldn't stand it one minute longer. I remained by the skin of my teeth." Despite such candid appraisal of his needy alma mater by this lone survivor, the College's intercontinental radio commercial--the feature event of Harvard's Day--won almost universal acclaim from those who are supposed to know. Variety, the show business journal, though that the broadcast "made the Harvard eggheads sound as provocative as peelers...