Word: whist
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...Lose Friends. At Ohio State, Ferguson is a C student in physical education. A quiet, reserved senior, he has lived off campus since his recent unpublicized marriage, has few pastimes other than roller skating and bid whist. Aware of the fame that only football could have brought him, he says: "Football has helped my life tremendously...
Sharp & Scholar. To the professional satisfaction of his older brother, William, a melancholy anatomist who became one of London's more fashionable physicians, John Hunter could bargain for corpses with the finesse of a whist sharp (which he was). But he had other talents too. A careless scholar, an indifferent cabinetmaker, John at 20 joined his brother's London medical school. He learned fast: within a year he was teaching one of William's dissecting classes; later he helped on his brother's major discovery-the first accurate descriptive anatomy of a pregnant uterus...
...Bridge World Editor Alphonse Moyse Jr. says Reader Howell has submitted a variant of the legendary Duke of Cumberland whist hand. The duke, sitting South (in this version), failed to take a single trick-and lost a bet of ?20,000 to West...
Toward the end of the 19th century, a newcomer of obscure and disputed origin appeared in England from beyond the Channel. Called Russian whist or biritch (soon anglicized into bridge), the new game differed from standard whist in two ways: the dealer named trumps, or passed the privilege across the table to his partner, and the dealer's partner became dummy, laying down his hand for all to see. London whist players who tried the new game soon noted that the exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British...
...Russian Whist. It took a long international evolution to produce modern bridge, with its beautiful balances between competition and cooperation, system and psychology. The ancestral game of whist, which still survives in English and New England villages, was bridge without bidding: the trump suit was decided on by turning up the last card dealt. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of whist: "Men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous." But with no bidding and no exposed hand to guide the players, the game was crude...