Word: viper
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Like Oscar Wilde's strong-minded dowager, Lady Bracknell, Madame de Sévigné held that "health is the primary duty of life." She was her daughter's full-time amateur diagnostician, strongly opposed to bloodletting, but an advocate of "viper soup," i.e., snake consomme. Often Madame de Sévigné sounds rather like a faded copy of "Versailles Confidential." ("At one fell stroke the other day, the Queen lost 20,000 crowns and missed hearing Mass.") Letter-Writer De Sévigné is more fun when she is consciously making her own mots...
...Minor Mode. Not so long ago, when there was not much reading and writing in the Kentucky coal-mining mountains, let alone radio or TV, folk singing was one way to keep track of history. In the town of Dwarf (pop. 300), near Viper, in Perry County, there are folks who can still remember a blind fellow named Oakes. singing about what was going...
...Hand me my dulcy-more," 62-year-old "Aunt" Ellen Fields will chirp to a visitor at her house near Viper. "This thang hain't much good any more. Ah put in a new fret-just took a pin and bit the head offen h'it-but h'it still don't play too good." When she plays, she puts the three-stringed instrument across her lap, then strums out the tune on the top string while the bottom two give off a thin, constant drone. For lonesome songs, she tunes the top string down...
...miner's son who left, took along his guitar and kept his feeling for the old music, was Merle Travis of Beech Creek (pop. 788), across the state from Viper...
Vivien Leigh's Lady Macbeth was not so kindly received. The Observer found her performance "more niminy-piminy than thundery-blundery, more viper than anaconda." But the Times found that her "pale and exquisitely lovely Lady Macbeth does at least explain why Macbeth married her, a mystery that too many Lady Macbeths leave unelucidated...