Word: tend
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fiddling with the door lock on the Tudor-style mansion, Funk says it will rain today. The countryside hums with farm machinery and insects. Inside, the house smells, the way old houses tend to, moist and rich, as if someone had enclosed a creek bottom. Late summer motes settle gently on the esoteric acquisitions of the once famous George Ade. Here a Grecian urn, there a Waterford crystal punch bowl that, when flicked crisply with a fingernail, keeps ringing clearly long after the flicker has left the room...
...favorite institution is the Church of England; many of her excellent women live through it, in a round of jumble sales, festivals, parish politics and hopeless crushes on clergymen. If Pym's ecclesiastics tend to be a weak, feckless lot, it is no wonder: they are endlessly cosseted by women. One of her most vibrant characters is Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle, actually an affectionate portrait of the author's sister Hilary. This middle-aged lady is crazy about curates, the younger and more threadbare the better. Any veteran of her bounty-rich food, good sherry, hand...
...social position is rigid. The Buks, peasants, are subservient to the Bukowskis, minor nobles who in turn serve the Lubonskis, major nobles (magnates). From the Tatar invasion in 1241 to the modern union negotiations, these three families appear, and each performs the task dictated by his rank. The Buks tend the horses of the Bukowskis, who fight fearlessly for the causes chosen by the Lubonskis...
...drifters and Flannery O'Connor grotesques seems to be dying out. Characters rarely worry any more about finding God or their next meal. They are likely instead to be well educated, sensitive to a fault, politically liberal, and affluent enough to feel pleasurable guilt in their possessions. They tend, in short, to resemble the stereotypical reader of The New Yorker, which is where the luckiest of these fictional people are chosen to appear. The rejected ones must troop off to the quarterlies and go through their paces (at greatly reduced rates) for smaller audiences composed of people with whom...
Being a snob of any kind is some times more difficult now. In a society of high discretionary capital and instantaneous communications, the snob and recherché effects tend to be copied and even mass-produced with stunning speed. For generations, much of America's old money walked around wearing beat-up crew-neck sweaters that had been around from St. Mark's or New Haven; the khakis were always a little too short, ending just at the ankles, and there were Top-Siders without socks. And so on. Then this came to be known as the Preppie...