Word: vulgarisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their windows one night and saw a group of students valiantly attempting to serenade one of the young ladies of the town. The brand-new Harvard Glee Club was out on its first tour but the venture was unsuccessful. A band of rival suitors, hidden in the shrubbery, made vulgar noises with wind instruments, unhitched the Harvard boys' horses so that the Glee Club had to walk back to Cambridge. During the next 25 years there was another short-lived Glee Club; then a third which was organized "to acquaint the College with good choral music." Last week...
...April shower. By the time four years are up we shall miss our Dolly Ganns and our Cissie Pattersons. Now, I am awfully sorry, I must rush off for a buffet affair for some 200 people. Isn't it vulgar...
London's Morning Post comments on the large number of new words of "America's queer coinage (which so often proves ancient currency disinterred)." E. g.- "Racket-a trick, dodge, scheme, game, line of business or action. 1812." "Skirt-A woman. Now vulgar slang, 1560.'' Unlike Sam Johnson, who occasionally winked (as when he defined "lexicographer" as "a harmless drudge") and who occasionally nodded into Latinic somnolence ("Network-anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections"), editors of the S. O. E. D. are always serious but try hard...
...making. Enough that for a day or a month the House of Morgan will stand before the world shorn of its awful respectability, its soundness, its pompous righteousness. For awhile at least, the mighty will be on trial in a position exposed to the insinuations and questionings of the vulgar people with whose money he has been playing...
Northwestern's child prodigies, who were selected in a blaze of glory and then carefully cloaked from vulgar inquiry, have come once more, and in a very fitting manner, to the attention of all. The senior of their number, now seventeen, has just been elected to Phi-Beta Kappa, with a truly prodigious grade average and amid appropriate eclat. Northwestern seems to feel that this vindicates the essential wisdom of her experiment, and even Dr. Flexner declares that he is reminded of his old dream of a prodigy high school in New York...