Word: websterisms
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...Cowpeas & Sweet Potatoes. Walter George, the only son of Robert Theodric and Sarah Stapleton George, was born in a sun-blistered pine house in Webster County, where his father scratched the hard clay to bring forth thin crops of cotton, cowpeas and sweet potatoes. Young George's reading material was his grandfather's collection of the Congressional Record. Recalls George: "The congressional style was ponderous in those days, but I learned to like it." One day George rode into nearby Preston on the back of an elderly mule. The village belle saw the youth, laughed...
Whisky & Courtesy. Today, after four months in business, Sports Information answers 18,000 calls a day; 17 researchers (all but two are paraplegics) field every question thrown at them. The office (Webster 8-3311) looks like a busy horse parlor, but its huge blackboard reflects more than track results: data on the big-time sports events are entered on the board, giving researchers the results at a glance. For the offbeat queries S.I.R. subscribes to a wire service and burrows through stacks of dog-eared reference books...
...Jacobite and High-flying tenets" and Johnson for "crouding" it with such "monstrous words" as "adespotick, amnicolist, androtomy." "Nearly one-third of this Dictionary," added Philologist John Home Tooke, "is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English." Years later the smug and able Noah Webster observed that confidence in the Dictionary "is the greatest injury to philology that now exists...
...inhabitants did less damage to the building than did the chemistry teacher who preceded them. In the 1830's Dr. John Webster, hiding behind a door while he stretched a pole with a candle at its end toward a kettle, would ignite "a volcano in an iron pot." In 1837 the pot exploded, smoke billowed forth, and his students threw themselves out of the windows...
...group numbers are all well done, and the addition of singing in the kickline number is an improvement over past years. An unusual variation is the modern dance, a clever number with only a few rough spots, and a credit to the choreographer, Robert Norris. Webster Lithgow's sets make the most of Sanders' legendary inconviences...