Word: welkin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Three days before he made the grammatical welkin ring, Winston Churchill was collecting an honorary degree at Columbia University. In the very home town of the American language, he was brash enough to decry the "undue reliance upon slang. In its right place slang has its virtues, but let us keep a tight hold of our own mother tongue...
...citizens wondered why there was a meat shortage. The welkin rang with name-calling and charges of avarice and Government bungling. The few facts that could be dug out of the row were startling. Some of them...
...borrowed a trailer and carted a 32-ton block of Tennessee marble onto the lawn in front of West Hartford's prim Town Hall. There, stripped to the waist, Sculptor Ziolkowski hacked and chiseled. He turned night into day with glaring floodlights, rang West Hartford's rural welkin with an electric drill. When the West Hartford clergy protested his working on the Sabbath, bushy-headed Ziolkowski snorted: "There seems to be no objection to golfing, tennis, motoring and sports in general on the Sabbath, so why the rumpus over the creation of a masterpiece of art?" As months...
Consternation ran high. When Dockweiler combed the studios before election, palm outstretched for contributions, all he got was the air. Fitts had been there first. On election night the "Fitts Victory Ball" collapsed early in a welkin of gloom. Industry patriarchs burned their lamps late exchanging phone calls on ways & means of getting on pleasanter terms with Dockweiler. In his next Hollywood Reporter editorial, W. R. ("Billy") Wilkerson, the industry's mouthpiece, trumpeted: "The King is dead. Long live the King." With lachrymose solemnity he recalled that Fitts had been a great friend, protecting the industry from phonies...
Tomatoes & Eggs. While Wendell Willkie stormed through New England, hoarsely lambasting "The Third Term Candidate" and the New Deal, other G. O. P. stalwarts marched up & down the land echoing or outdoing him. William Harrison Fetridge, managing editor of The Republican, thought the welkin was ringing too loudly, wrote: "The time has come to talk plainly to a lot of Republicans. . . . Quiet, thoughtful, reasonable talk will win more votes than all the bombast you can muster." New York's Congressman Bruce Barton, candidate for the U. S. Senate, nailed a thesis on Mr. Roosevelt's front door charging...