Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last year Lewis engaged in a verbal slugging match with Harvard's crotchety critic Bernard DeVoto, who (in The Literary Fallacy) had attacked Lewis and other writers of the '205, had urged that the epithet "fool" be introduced into the vocabulary of literary criticism. "Fool," cried Novelist Lewis...
...from America . . . Considerably less ordered and arranged was Congress' experience with one of its fraternal foreign delegates, the A.F. of L.'s burly George Meany. A tough-talking ex-plumber from New York. Meany carried a verbal rocket in his pocket, lost no time firing it. His target: Soviet Russia, whose fellow fraternal delegate, Michael P. Tarasov, sat an arm's length away...
...goes on in Duffy's Tavern. Victor Moore, in handling everything from a glass of brandy to a paintbrush, is a virtuoso of the fumble. Ed Gardner, who rather suggests a ravaged Randolph Scott, is as agreeable to see as he is to hear. His specialty is straight verbal misfires such as "satisfied public accountant," his proud claim to sexual "maggotism" and his wistful reference to his Harvard days ("good old Eli"). But he also delivers a permanent description of a moneybag: "If he can't take it with him I guarantee...
Comedienne Joan Davis, who does visual pratfalls on the screen and verbal ones on the radio, went back on the air last week with a new distinction. For the first time, she was her own boss-and under a million-dollar-a-year contract which makes her the highest-paid woman performer in radio...
World War II has brought a spate of innovations, ranging from the G.I.-adopted Shangri-La (designating a comfort-station in the South Seas) to the experienced tires hopefully advertised by second-hand automobile dealers. Only in the field of creative swearing, concludes Author Mencken, has American verbal fecundity sunk as low as Britain...