Word: twain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...postman arrives with a letter calling one's attention to the late George Ade, of Brook, Ind., 80 miles southeast of Chicago. Who? "He belongs in the historical category of Mark Twain," the letter informs, "and Will Rogers, whose philosophy was influenced by George Ade. His celebrous role deserves to be revivified." Did curiosity ever really kill a cat? To the telephone...
Close. In fact, Soviet translators have been weaned on Dickens, Thackeray, Twain and other 19th century writers, which explains why Moscow's attacks, once translated, sometimes seem comically grandiloquent. The colorful terms of last week entered the Russian-English dictionaries at the beginning of the century. Ignoramus, first popularized in England in the 1600s as a synonym for dunce, is Latin for "we do not know." In the original Russian version, the word is nevezhda, which means "an ignorant person." Krokodilovy slyozy, which translates literally as "tears of the crocodile," derives from a Russian fable similar to the Western...
Everybody talks about the weather," Mark Twain might have said, "but nobody does anything about it." For farmers, such talk is not idle chitchat, especially these days. In a parched field west of Twain's home town of Hannibal, a Missouri farmer was, of course, talking about the weather. The seven-week-long drought, after all, has desiccated as much as half the crops in the Midwest and South. "My corn was ruined by July 20," says Paul Wilson of Shelbyville. "There were too many days over 100° while the corn was trying to pollinate." Wilson...
...back to the subject of popular literature, and the Executioner asked, "Can you think of any examples of high literature which use the vernacular?" No. They suggested Twain. I hate Twain I said. "That depends on what you mean 'high' literature...
Famous Literary Typewriters. Hitler evidently did not use a typewriter, being a dictator, but other writers have found it indispensable. J.M. Synge and Henry James, to name two. Mark Twain, who typed the manuscript of either Tom Sawyer or Life on the Mississippi (the matter is murky), became the first author to hand in a typewritten book to his publisher. Of his Remington, Twain wrote: "It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around." Twain also began the practice of double-spacing manuscripts, thus providing room for editors ever since to fill the margins with the words "awkward...