Word: wantonness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Language, like the world it represents, can never be static. Even today the pun survives fitfully in tabloid headlines: JUDGES WEIGH FAN DANCER'S ACT, FIND IT WANTON. It survives in the humor of S.J. Perelman, the only post-Joycean writer capable of fluent bilingual flippancy: "lox vobiscum," "the Saucier's Apprentice," and the neo-Joycean "Anna Trivia Pluralized." The pun makes its happiest regular appearance in the work of Novelist Peter De Vries, who writes stories about compulsive punners. "I can't stop," he claims. "I even dream verbal puns. Like the one in which...
...confronts his paramours, who happen to be some of her best friends. She then determines to be wild and wanton enough with Hubby's friends to match his score. He meanwhile is being ministered to by a battalion of quacks and incompetents, and is fading faster with every hour...
...scale war against us." She announced that the Pakistan air force had struck eight Indian airfields, and that ground forces were shelling Indian defense positions in several sectors along the western border. "I have no doubt that it is the united will of our people," she said, "that this wanton and unprovoked aggression of Pakistan should be decisively and finally repelled...
...State William P. Rogers and presented to visiting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, says that the Administration policy "places the United States on the side of a government which is deliberately flouting the results of a national election, denying East Bengal the most elementary rights of self-determination, and committing wanton massacres against an unarmed people...
Before that is possible, however, a political solution must be found that would end the Pakistani army's reign of terror, wanton destruction and pogroms aimed particularly at the 10 million members of the Hindu minority in predominantly Moslem East Pakistan (pop. 78 million at the start of the civil...