Word: thurberism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thurber Album. Back through the turns of time with James Thurber of Columbus, Ohio (TIME, June...
Lamp Oil Internally. Way back in the Thurber cousinhood there was Dr. Beall. a homeopath in a plug hat, who believed in "small doses of mild drugs, a heavy meal three times a day, a good cigar after each one, a little whisky to regulate the heart, a cheerful disposition to relax the system, a healthy skepticism to clear the mind of notions, and a sane moderation in exercise and bathing, either of which could kill a man if he didn't watch out." Doc Beall's most common prescription was lamp oil taken internally. He took...
...Most of Thurber's forebears were long-lived and the men were men, not the modern shrew-ridden neurosis carriers of the Thurber cartoons. In his 70s, Great-Grandfather Fisher could lift 200 lbs. over his head. When he died at 77, his hair was black and he had "all his own teeth in his head, too-all except one. That'd been knocked out with a brick in a fight." Toward the end, he came to look at a newborn great-grandchild, "a puny boy weighing seven pounds." "Goddam it," he said, "the next generation of Fishers...
Follies with Grace. Author Thurber's own start in life came at the hands of Midwife Margery Albright, who rates, and gets, one of the most endearing portraits in the Album. Aunt Margery "knew where sour grass grew, which you chew for dyspepsy, and mint, excellent for the naushy, and the slippery elm . . . for raw throat and other sore tishas." Contemptuous of doctors, she cured her husband of fever by forcing a broth of sheep droppings down his protesting gullet. For stubborn pregnancies she blew powdered tobacco "up one nostril of the expectant mother," and so brought...
...Thurber Album has some fine stuff about his city editor on the Columbus Dispatch. He disliked college men, contemptuously called Thurber "Phi Beta Kappa" (which he was), and could intone it "so that it sounded like a Girl Scout's merit badge." He came to like Thurber, but he never liked fancy writing, which he always greeted with "This story is in bloom!" Other good men well remembered are Cartoonist Billy Ireland (a man so kind he once complimented a friend's wife with "Edna, that's the prettiest washing out there I ever saw"), several profs...